Wandering Wonderings - A Journey of Life & Faith

Kindle fire

2011-12-03T09:48:00.000-05:00

Win a Kindle Fire?

from my friends at The Englewood Review of Books...

http://erb.kingdomnow.org/win-a-kindle-fire-in-our-christmas-giveaway/

Peace to Your House!

2011-11-20T14:41:00.003-05:00

“Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace to this house!’ And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you. Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide…. Do not move about from house to house.” –Luke 10:5-7

This week I’ve been wrestling with this verse. Better yet, through this verse God has been wrestling with me. It’s been doing some work on me, as I’ve been forced to think about what it means to be a person of peace. (That’s the holy danger of living with a text for a while. It’s sort of like Jacob wrestling with God all through the night by the river Jabbok. You’ll probably get a blessing, but it could come with a limp!)

What has really captured me this week, or, better, what has convicted me this week is the instruction to “remain in the same house.” I think that it is easy for most of us to come and proclaim peace, but it’s another thing altogether when we are called to remain somewhere for a while.

What Jesus envisions here is not a flash-mob approach to peace, where we invite someone to give peace a chance and then are on our way. This is about abiding, about remaining, about dwelling. Others will learn what peace looks like as we remain with them over a prolonged period of time. God’s peace is revealed through the habits and patterns of life as we live together.

And not only that, the way we interact with one another and with others reveals something about the ways in which we connect with God. In her book Sacred Rhythms, Ruth Hallie Barton puts it this way:

“Our patterns of intimacy or nonintimacy with other human beings are the very same patterns we bring to our relationship with God, whether we are conscious of it or not.”

That idea is doing some serious work on me this week. I want to be a person of peace. I want to connect deeply with God. I want to be in life-giving, intimate relationships with other people. I am sure that you do too. What I am coming to realize is that these things are all deeply connected.

My prayer today, flowing from dwelling in this Word, is that God will transform this community of believers into people of peace, as you remain together in this church house, eating together, drinking together, and creating a rich life together in the Spirit of the One who has called you and sent you ahead of him into the world!

Peace to this house! -ERM

Learning to Walk

2011-05-14T09:30:00.002-04:00

It seemed to come from out of nowhere. Before dinnertime on Thursday, Z would stand in place holding toys and my cell phone. But, if she decided she wanted to get anywhere, she would drop down on her right knee and trust her signature move, a little modified monkey crawl, to get her wherever she wanted to go. She’s quite the scooter too. It’s hard at times to keep up with her, much less think far enough ahead of her to make sure a room is “Z friendly.”

But something happened during dinner. I’m not sure what it was exactly. I guess it could have been the split pea soup. Those mighty little legumes are packed with fiber, protein, and some B-vitamins, a perfect food for physical performance. It might have been the Cornbread, sweetened with a just hint of maple syrup to jumpstart the motor. Maybe it was the rice milk, a surefire way to… nah, it wasn’t the rice milk.

I’m not sure exactly what happened in those 25 minutes at the table, but as soon as she had successfully eaten and cleaned off her tray in neat little split pea piles on the floor, something changed. Our little monkey crawler became a walker. Momma shared our joy with the Facebook world, “And...she...walks!!! Just like that. Before dinner, crawling. After dinner, walking! 14 months to the day!”

M, momma, and I spent the next 20 minutes in a living room triangle, coaxing her to walk back and forth between us, while the camera flash popped and the camcorder captured the newly crowned toddler toddling.

She had her share of stops and starts. We aren’t talking red carpet gracefulness here. She would take a couple of steps, stop to teeter a bit, and then get moving again. She would get excited and let her head lean a bit too far forward. And when her noggin gets in front of her little feet, let’s just say inertia works! The best moment for us as parents was watching Z walk with reckless abandon into M’s arms as they both giggled and rolled to the floor. That was priceless.

The reality is that, while this transformation from crawler to walker seemed spontaneous to us, Z had built up to this moment. She’d trained for it. She’d cultivated the ability to walk. She prepared her body and her little legs for months, testing her balance, developing strength, and learning the basics of the movements. She prepared her mind, learning to have faith in herself. She moved from lying helplessly on the ground, to rolling, to sitting, to scooting, to crawling, to cruising, and now to walking. It happened “just like that,” but it was also a long time coming.

Life in God is a lot like that. Life with God is about walking in the Spirit. It’s not passive; it’s active. It’s not static; it’s dynamic. We don’t just start walking, but we build up to it. We grow to trust the Spirit, others, and ourselves. We rely on the support and encouragement of others who’ve been down this path before. We learn to walk.

This is one of the reasons that it is vital for Christians to practice the spiritual disciplines. The disciplines are not about earning our salvation, but about embracing it. They do not help us earn God’s favor, but to trust it. Just as Z nurtured her whole self to embrace that moment of walking, the spiritual disciplines are about learning to walk. They open our lives to God, so that we can learn to walk in cadence with the Spirit. They open our lives to one another, so we can be drawn together into the fellowship of the Trinity. They open our lives to the world, so that we can participate in the fullness of God’s salvation. The disciplines help us cultivate new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in the world. They help us to learn to walk in the steps of the one who said, “Follow me.”

At one point as Z toddled her way around the living room on Thursday, M looked at us and said, “So I guess she’ll be doing this the rest of her life.” Yes, big sis. Yes, she will. And I pray that we will all keep learning to walk too.

The Guest

2010-11-23T16:26:00.002-05:00

Today I read this wrenching and probing poem by Wendell Berry. Like all of Berry's work, it hits too close to home and challenges my feeble attempts to follow the way of Jesus daily. This is especially challenging as we move into the season of Advent and remember that our God is always coming, sometimes as a pregnant young girl looking for a room, sometimes as a "guest" encountered on the street, sometimes in our neighbor, and sometimes in the form of family, who no matter how close always remain strangers and guests to us....

God, as you continue to come into your world and walk into our lives, give us the grace to see you and the strength to refuse "to remain strange" to the threshold of our heart and a seat at our table.

The Guest

Washed into the doorway
by the wake of the traffic
he wears humanity
like a third-hand shirt
—blackened with enough
of Manhattan’s dirt to sprout
a tree, or poison one.
His empty hand has led him
where he has come to.
our differences claim us.
He holds out his hand,
in need of all that’s mine.

And so we’re joined, as deep
as son and father. His life
is offered me to choose.

Shall I begin servitude
to him? Let this cup pass.
Who am I? But charity must
suppose knowing no better,
that this is a man fallen
among thieves, or come
to this strait by no fault
—that our differences
is not a judgment,
though I can afford to eat
and am made his judge.

I am, I nearly believe,
the Samaritan who fell
into the ambush of his heart
on the way to another place.
My stranger waits, his hand
held out like something to read,
as though its emptiness
is an accomplishment.
I give him a smoke and the price
of a meal, no more

—not sufficient kindness
or believable sham.
I paid him to remain strange
to my threshold and table,
to permit me to forget him—
knowing I won’t. He’s the guest
of my knowing, though not asked.

- Wendell Berry

The God Who Remembers

2010-10-10T08:01:00.001-04:00

Since September I’ve been making a slow journey through Genesis on Wednesday nights with a brilliant group of folks. It’s been an incredibly life-giving journey for me. One of the things that has struck me is the way we are sometimes hesitant to engage Scripture. We all have certain assumptions about God, expectations that have been shaped over time by our study, our communities, and our experiences in life. It can be challenging when we really engage Scripture and come face to face with things that don’t fit very neatly into our tidy categories about God and life in the world. (This is, in my opinion, one of the very reasons that we should read, discuss, and engage Scripture together with others in humble love and faith.)

The Bible uses some striking language to talk about God. Admittedly, God is bigger than the limited language that we use to make sense of God. But, that doesn’t make necessarily make it easier to engage the biblical stories, especially when we encounter some strange descriptions of God and God’s actions. The God that we encounter in Genesis is a God that seems to be learning how to be in relationship with this new creation as things progress from one scene to the next. As a relational being, the God of Genesis is deeply committed to maintaining a relationship with creation. We find there a God similar to the descriptions we’ve recently seen in Hosea 11 of a parent who paces over a rebelling child.

At the end of the day, we might just think that God will want to forget this whole “creation experiment” and return to the ways things were before God spoke creation into existence. Yet, this is not what we get. We see that God is constantly rethinking things, searching to discover new ways to engage creation, to try to calm the chaos that remains in the world, ways of surprising and unexpected grace. With each trial and failure, God commits and covenants to find new ways for people to “walk with God” (Gen 2:8, 5:22, 6:9, 17:1).

This struggle is seen pretty clearly in the wake of the serious crisis surrounding the flood in Genesis 6-9. There are so many things that are both brilliant and deeply troubling about his scene. (We had a great conversation about some of them on last Wednesday.) What I love about this scene, though, what really strikes me is a line that pops up unexpectedly at the beginning of chapter 8. “But God remembered Noah.”

“But God remembered….” For some people, the thought of God remembering may stir up serious anxiety. You’ve been to some dark places in life, rebellious places, places where chaos seems to reign. Yet, this simple line is far from something that should instill fear or anxiety. God’s remembering is a surprising act of grace. In the wake of the flood, God remembers, and when God remembers, new creation begins! God remembers and does something surprising through God’s Spirit or God’s ‘wind’ to breathe new life into creation, once again stilling the chaotic waters and bringing a new possibility. (Reread 8:1-5 along side Genesis 1.) God even puts the bow in the sky so that God will remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature” (9:15-16).

“But God remembered….” At a time when God might have preferred to forget, to abort creation and leave the waters of chaos wreaking havoc on the world, “God remembered.” The Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel once wrote, “God is God because he remembers.” In a world where memories are short, where we are constantly bombarded with new news that is hardly newsworthy, Genesis reminds us that our God remembers. And that is truly news worth sharing. That is gospel!

"Healing, Loving, Turning" (Hosea 14)

2010-10-05T17:01:00.002-04:00

It started during the summer between my 8^th and 9^th grade years. I was a good kid. I always had been. I was raised in the church. I’m at least fourth generation in the Stone-Campbell Movement on both sides of my family. I had a long history of church camps, bible classes, of VBS and “churchy” events under my belt. I’d been liberated through the waters of baptism after years of walking with my parents and learning the rhythms and moves of faith. I’d learned by watching and listening to them because they were the very presence of God in my life. But there was something that summer, there was something about that group of older teens, something about them that intrigued me.

It started at a work camp, actually. I haven’t seen a work camp here in Detroit like we had back in Tulsa, where youth groups from all over town would come together to partner for a week to go into downtrodden neighborhoods and scrape and paint houses, just as a way to try to help bring a gift of life, a little new blessing into neighborhoods.

And it was during that week of work camp that I worked beside a group of juniors and seniors that were from my own youth group. But as a junior high kid, I just didn’t know them. Our middle school and high school groups were split apart and so I hadn’t had a chance to meet this group of teens.

I was at that age, at that point in my life, where I was desperately longing to be drawn in and accepted. I wanted to be able to trusting others. So I decided to trust in these new friends. They were older. They had cars and could get me wherever I wanted or needed to go. They had jobs and more money and could help pay for me when I didn’t have it. They were popular and simply getting noticed by them gave me a whole different sense of self-worth. It made me feel important. It made me feel certain. It made me feel secure.

All the while I was slipping further and further from who I was. I was becoming more and more alienated from my family. I started moving to the music of another life, not to the rhythms of the self-emptying, God-like love my parents had shown me.

As my 9^th grade school year rolled around, I know my parents had hoped for a new beginning. I was heading to a new school and getting a new start in so many different things in life. Much to their chagrin, I was increasingly a frustration to my parents…. I was an ornery kid; I was volatile; and I was more than a little too big for my britches.

Soon enough, as you can imagine, the tension in the family hit the breaking point and culminating in a fight on stairs with dad. We’d been in the kitchen. My parents simply wanted to talk to me…. To make the effort, the plea to me to think about what I was doing and who I was becoming. I refused to listen. And when they kept talking, kept pleading and insisting, I decided that I’d had enough and I walked out of the kitchen and headed up the stairs. My mom stopped at the bottom of the stairs, but my dad followed me up. Half way up the stair on the landing he put his hand on my shoulder, gently trying to get me to stop. I turned and shoved him away. And we instantly broke into a wrestling match on the stairs, right next to an eight-foot tall stained glass window. My mom stood at the bottom weeping. My dad, wrestling for me. My mom, broken-hearted and crying for me. And I was wrestling for my independence.

Things seemed to calm down from that point on. There was less tension, less fighting, less… well, less of a relationship. Looking back, I think that my parents had decided that they needed to turn away, not to refuse to love me, that was something they never could do, but because they loved me. And while we lived in the same house, there was a lot of silence for a while, while I kept turning from my parents, from the ones who gave me life, to other things.

Yahweh and the Northern Kingdom

Over the past several weeks, Klint’s helped us to enter into the experience of God and Israel through the eyes of the prophet Hosea. The Northern Kingdom of was at the height of rebellion. They had turned from the Lord their God, their only savior and comforter, and put their trust in so many other things:

They kept turning to the great foreign power, Assyria, from whom they erroneously expected help again and again. Even though it was the Lord their God who delivered them from Egypt.

They kept turning to the Baals to make their land and their fields fertile and to give them a good crop. Even though it was the Lord their God who provided them with their daily bread, with manna and quail in the wilderness and water from a rock.

They kept turning to their own military strength, which had surely grown as the nation of Israel grew stronger and wealthier and more established. Even though the Lord their God had proven it was not their own might but God’s that brought them into the Promised Land.

Because of their rebellion, God had wrestled with Israel, pacing internally over God’s wayward child, struggling to know how best to respond, torn between the compassionate love of a mother whose womb grows warm and tender at the sight of her child and a parent who knows that a child’s incessant turning must eventually bring about his collapse.

So Israel, like a child dizzy from turning and turning after all of the ephemeral and fleeting and failing things she’s trusts and wants, fell….

And many years down the road, with the fall of the northern kingdom as good as complete, the word of the Lord again came to Israel through the prophet Hosea…

Hear the Word of the Lord from Hosea 14:

Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God,
for you have stumbled because of your iniquity.
² Take words with you
and return to the Lord;
say to him,
‘Take away all guilt;
accept that which is good,
and we will offer
the fruit^* of our lips.
³ Assyria shall not save us;
we will not ride upon horses;
we will say no more, “Our God”,
to the work of our hands.
In you the orphan finds mercy.’

⁴ I will heal their disloyalty;
I will love them freely, I will love them spontaneously
for my anger has turned from them.
⁵ I will be like the dew to Israel;
he shall blossom like the lily,
he shall strike root like the forests of Lebanon.^*
⁶ His shoots shall spread out;
his beauty shall be like the olive tree,
and his fragrance like that of Lebanon.
⁷ They shall again live beneath my^* shadow,
they shall flourish as a garden;^*
they shall blossom like the vine,
their fragrance shall be like the wine of Lebanon.

⁸ O Ephraim, what have I^* to do with idols?
It is I who answer and look after you.^*
I am like an evergreen cypress;
your fruitfulness^* comes from me.
⁹ Those who are wise understand these things;
those who are discerning know them.
For the ways of the Lord are right,
and the upright walk in them,
but transgressors stumble in them. “

The disaster has already taken place, but Yahweh, the God of Israel, desires a new beginning, for it was not the Lord their God but Israel’s guilt, Israel’s fickle turning, that brought his collapse.

But Israel is not the center of this story; God is.

And in the strange economy of God, a fall is rarely final. The Lord their God was there. The Lord their God had already turned. The Lord their God was waiting with open arms to embrace God’s dizzy and stumbling son.

This is the center, the kernel, the heart of our entire passage today. As the threat of collapse follows God’s verdict from chapters 12 & 13, so the announcement and promise of abundant life springs unexpectedly out of Israel’s fall.

Like a mother offering a hand to a little child looking at a room that is still spinning in his head, God promises to take Israel from his dizzying turning to the secure presence of God. God’s steadying voice declares:

I, the Lord your God, will heal your wayward turning, your disloyalty.

In the midst of your sickness and near death, I will breath new, resurrection life into you.

I, the Lord your God, will love you spontaneously, freely.

There is nothing that you can do, nothing you can offer that will earn you my love. Trust in me, for in my holiness I am setting in motion a completely new future for you!

I, the Lord your God, will turn from my anger and turn right back to you.

Even while you were turning from me, I was turning back to you. I will no longer haunt you like the lion, the leopard, or the angry bear. I the Lord your God am the dew, which gives life and growth, which is always present even when not seen. You will be nourished by my healing and life-bringing love. Israel will blossom forth anew. His roots shall be deep and he shall flourish and rest in the shelter of my shade.

From his dizzied turning, from desolation, from dryness, and from death, waters will fall and new life will spring forth for Israel. Israel will rest again in the shade of a tree. Israel’s faithfulness, his fruitfulness will come from God, not from Assyria, not from the gods he made by own hands, not from within himself. It is God who looks after Israel. The Lord his God will give him life.

So, here, after letting Israel fall, on the brink of total collapse, the strange God of Israel has the last word, a word of hope and promise to Israel… if only he will listen.

BACK TO TULSA:

I think that this is the wisdom that my parents knew. You see, they had been learning from the ways of Israel’s strange God their whole lives. They were brilliant parents, even in the midst of my growing longing for independence and my rebellious turning. They understood that sometimes you can’t steady someone who is dizzy, but you must let them fall, no matter how hard. Sometimes that is the only way that their idols will crash and be revealed for the idols they are.

Yet, my parents were there. They were always there. Even before I had fallen, even in the midst of the battle, my parents had already turned away from their anger and turned back to me. They were ready to heal my disloyalty; they were anxious to love my freely and spontaneously. Not because of anything that I’d done, but because I was no orphan but their child. I was the child of their womb and they longed to have compassion on me.

To many of you, this may seem unimaginable. You’d never struggle with your family. You’ve never had a fight. You’ve never wandered from a very straight and very narrow path. You couldn’t imagine your children doing anything rebellious or ever questioning you.

To others this may sound like a page off of children’s book. I know that there are others who are sitting here who have been to places far darker than I’ve ever been. You’ve turned to far greater challenges. You’ve trusted in things that are far more insidious than I ever did.

But the truth is that the story we encounter in Hosea, and the surprising act of the grace of God in chapter 14 is not just Israel’s. It is our own. This God, the Lord their God, is not just their God but is ours.

Much like Jonah, the prophetic ministry of Hosea ends abruptly, with little resolution. Instead, of “the rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey might give us, we read a word of exhortation to us.

Those who are wise understand these things; those who are discerning know them.

For the ways of the Lord are right, and the upright walk in them, but transgressors stumble in them.

This is a word to us. This is our “summons to understand and to follow. Every reader, every one of us, is called upon to decide between discipleship and revolt and thus between walking or stumbling in our dizziness…. “These words are not just for Israel for also for us, that we might discover and the following the way of Israel’s God as the way of the present and of the future” (Wolff).

We each struggle with our own idolatry, with trusting in and turning to things that are not God for safety, for security, for pleasure, for what feels like life.

But even in our dizziness, even in our dizziness, if we turn and reach out our arms to embrace God again, we’ll discover that God has already turned, opens God’s arms, and enwraps us with the healing embrace of his love.

This is gospel… the Word of the Lord.

Let's pray together:

Oh Lord God,

Our lives are spent turning

Like children dizzied by the colorful array of toys

Lining the toy store shelves

We turn.

Voices from within and without promise to bring us

Hope

Joy

Security

Fulfillment

Hollow pleasure.

We hear their siren’s call and spin to find them.

But in our dizzied turning,

Amid the cacophony of voices

We stumble,

Not knowing which way to turn

Not knowing which voice to trust

Amid the seductive calls and hollow promises

We hear your voice again

Prompting

Inviting

Promising

Stilling

Yet it is hard for us to turn to you

It is hard because we put our trust in so many other places

In the future of the market

In the possibility of our jobs

In people and in relationships that we can manipulate

In our own ability and gifts and skills

In the security of our own religious traditions

We trusted in these because we believed they were predictable, controllable, familiar.

It is hard to turn to you because the gods we’ve made,

The gods that we’ve crafted, that we’ve given life and trusted,

Keep calling

Arresting our attention

Commanding our devotion

Demanding our energy

So that they might live.

But we long for liberation for our idols’ demands, for they are

For they are overwhelming

For they are exhausting

For they are dizzying

They are bringing us death

But above it all we hear the promise of your voice

From our dizzied spinning we stop and turn definitively to you

We turn from the gods created by our own hands to you,

To the uncreated and eternal one who turns from your anger and turns back to us.

To love us

To forgive us

To embrace us

Redeem us through your lavish, liberating forgiveness

Renew us by your relentless, free love

Steady us with your healing embrace

We return to you…, turn to us.

Amen.

Reflecting God in Marriage and for the World: A Wedding Homily

2010-08-26T09:52:00.003-04:00

[This is the homily from a wedding Natalie and I got to officiate together a few weeks ago.
Our text for the day was Philippians 2:1-15.]

EM:
 Well, here we are. It took distant cafeteria glances, some dodge ball mayhem, and a little Strawberry Jam to get the ball rolling, but we’ve made it here. You’ve tested your relationship through the heart of long, cold Michigan winters and in the heat of the west Texas desert. There was no single moment of a grand "Explosion in the Sky," just small but brilliant moments woven together to bring us to this day where you can look at each other and say, I long to have “Your Hand in Mine.” And now today is finally here. J, it just might be the GDE, the “greatest day ever.” It probably seems like you are a long way from the Taekwondo dojo and the dance studio, from talking art and music with friends and from singing with musical groups, but you’re here.

You are joined today by people who love you, who have come to celebrate with you and share in this covenant and who by their own presence promise to help you honor one another and keep the vows you are making today.

J, you’ve spent plenty of nights at our house, gathering with the “Thank Gorlad It’s Friday” gang to dive deeply in the mysteries of friendship and life and faith. We’ve watched you grow deeper in love with God and wrestle to discern the direction of your life with the support of godly friends and mentors. These were holy moments, moments shaped by the fellowship of the Spirit.

E, We’ve seen the deep love and care and concern you have for your family… We’ve watched you selflessly set aside your own preferences, plans, and prerogatives to support your friends. When they’ve been in desperate need of someone to listen and understand, you’ve poured out the love and consolation of God into their lives. These were holy moments, moments shaped by the fellowship of the Spirit.

Together you’ve been shaped by the love and support of old and new friends, of your families, and of communities of faith that have walked with you as you figured out how to prepare for this day and for a lifetime together…. These were holy moments, moments shaped by the fellowship of the Spirit.

I think that this is one of the reasons I love the way Paul starts the beginning of today’s passage. “If you have any…” “If you have any encouragement, any solace, any fellowship…” “If you have any…” I’m convinced that Paul isn’t doubting the bonds he shares with the Philippian Christian community. I definitely do not think he is questioning their common experience of being “in Christ.” In fact, I think it’s much the opposite. Paul is confident that this is safe ground for him to walk on. He is certain that they’ve drunk deeply of the goodness of life in Christ, that they’ve started faithfully on this journey, that they’ve tasted the sweetness of benefits and blessings of life together with one another in the Lord.

So Paul daringly begins,
If Christ is any encouragement to you at all… and of course he is!
If you’ve experienced the solace of love… and of course you have!
If the Spirit has enabled and empowered your fellowship with one another… and of course she has!
If God’s compassion and mercy have encountered you… and of course they have!

And as that community hears these words read, they look around at the other faces in that little house church and memories begin to flood their minds, memories of times when they’ve encountered Christ, when they’ve shared together in the compassion and mercy of God, when they’ve fellowshipped deeply in God’s Spirit. And just like that little church, you can look at the faces around this room, and as you look, you begin to remember some amazing stories. And so, like Paul, we confidently affirm today that you’ve experienced this type of life, you’ve tasted the reality of this beautiful unity in God.

NM:
This unity does not happen on its own. It takes effort. We are to go about participating in life with God with such intent that we engage each day, as Paul later says, “with fear and trembling.” This text demonstrates the seriousness with which Jesus took his calling. He chose to empty himself to a degree beyond what we can imagine.

So if we are to have the same mind as Christ, if we are to embody the pattern he has set forth, what does it look like? I believe Paul offers us the starting point…of our relationships with others. We are not to be driven by our selfishness and arrogance. To borrow a bit of language from another text, we are to “clothe ourselves” in humility and see others as better than ourselves. Rather than looking after our own interests, we are to discern the interests of others and restlessly pursue just that.

Marriage…seems like a natural opportunity to learn how to step into this passage. Now, I recognize that today you have nothing but positive and loving feelings for one another, so what I am saying does not seem like this is really all that difficult. But there will be a day, soon enough, when your selfishness seems to come out of nowhere! If you are anything like us, which I suspect you are since you’re human, you will have many occasions in the years to come where letting go of yourself for the other is the last thing you want to do; when you won’t really feel more love for the other than you do for yourself. (For us I think it hit on about day three!)

So as you begin your lives together, make it your goal to live out this kind of love more and more each day. Seek to let go when you feel yourself frantically trying to manipulate and get your way. Strive to love one another in the self-emptying manner that you each has felt and received from Christ.

EM:
This could be a bit overwhelming, especially in the toughest of moments, when everything inside of you is fighting the call to empty yourself, when the temptation for self-preservation and looking out for your own interest seems too strong to avoid. But don’t despair for you are never doing it alone. (Don’t analyze, calculate, and over-think it all.) In fact, you can give of yourselves with reckless abandon. As you move more fully into the life of the triune God together, as you give of yourself and work out this salvation, God is working in you, partnering with you, pouring God’s own life into you…

We remember that Christ’s death on the cross wasn’t the final word. It was a surprising moment of revealing both the heart and the strange economy of God. So you can always understand your own lives in God’s economy, in which God is constantly working, empowering, redeeming, and resurrecting things according to God’s ultimate purposes. You can give of yourselves freely to one another because you affirm God’s continued care and activity in your own lives and you trust in the surprising and grace-filled work of God that is continually breaking in all around you.

It is that very power of God that will empower you to live for each other out of the super-abundance of love, rather than out of lack. And as you partner with God for one another’s sake, you can also be sure that God is making you holy!

NM:
J and E, although this day is very much about the two of you, it is really about God who has brought you together and who will sustain you. It is about bearing witness to the world of a self-emptying love that only comes from God. In this kind of love, you will certainly stand out; As Paul says, you will shine like stars in, an extremely dark world. People will be drawn to the awe-inspiring love of the Trinity that is lived out between you.

And not only are you to seek to embody this passage with one another, but you are to extend love to all people, even the unlovable…the annoying...the enemy. E, you are to love those patients who are incredibly mean to you. J you are to love those classmates and authors who think a bit more highly of themselves than they ought. And as you move into your first home together, you are to seek ways of extending love and hospitality to neighbors who may drastically differ from you.

So in light of the ways that you will reflect the love of God in your own relationship and in interactions with others, I believe it is symbolic that you are facing the audience as you make this covenant today. As you remember this day in years to come, I hope that you will recall that your very orientation right now represents the outward aspect of your relationship. I pray that the self-emptying love that God gives you for one another will not be kept just for yourselves but that you will seek to join God’s work of redemption in the world and tirelessly pour love out on all whom you encounter.

So now, facing outward before this wonderful crowd of family and friends, you have the opportunity to exchange the vows that you have written for one another and for God.

Negative Space in Scripture

2010-08-25T13:52:00.006-04:00

This Sunday in a class on Jonah 3, I tried to press people a bit on their assumptions about what is and is not present in the text. One brilliant facet of Hebrew narrative is the great economy authors use in their story-telling. This leaves a lot of room for midrash, or examining and retelling the stories to fill in the gaps according to our assumptions.

In the wake of the class I got the following unexpected but welcome email from someone who was in the class. I hope to explore this idea a bit more in the coming weeks, as well as it's connection to apophatic and kataphatic spirituality.

For now, read this email piece and reflect on your own reading of Scripture. How could reading in the negative space transform your reading of Scripture? How might looking at what is not said, especially in comparison to your assumptions about a passage, change the way you understand God, yourself, and the world?

I just wanted to thank you for the little jewel in class this morning....when you started talking about focusing on what is not written in Jonah...it connected immediately in my mind with the use of negative space in art and photography! Focusing on what is not there helps you to see more clearly what you are looking at...it is so easy to be lulled into a false image of what you expect the thing to look like because of your familiarity with the object...when you pay more attention to what is not there (the negative space) it helps you to more clearly define what you are really seeing.

So often when I am reading scripture, I am lulled into "seeing" it the way I always have...looking at the negative space (what is not being said) may lead me to re-examine what that passage may have to say to me...I realize that this may be a very simple and routine practice for you but for me it was one of those ah-hah moments and I thank you for it!

A Little Child Shall Lead...

2010-08-25T13:44:00.001-04:00

Some kids destroyed M's pumpkin bucket last night. She'd been making 'mud cakes' outside, and last night someone kicked the bucket, shattering it.

On the phone today she told me, "I want to tell them what Jesus would, 'I still love you, but you hurt my feelings by doing that. But I forgive you."

Haven't I read something somewhere about a little child leading....

This Is No Fairytale: A Wedding Homily

2010-08-19T15:54:00.003-04:00

(This is the homily from my little sister's wedding this past weekend.)

Scripture for the day: 2 Corinthians 3:17-4:16a.

Well, here we are. K, we’ve come along way from the Carebears and Strawberry Shortcake. (I do think I remember that those Carebears soccer uniforms were purple too though!) No more duets of “another time and another place,” where you totally outshine my feeble attempts to sing…. No more crazy cheerleading costumes…. No more sneaking sunshine packages to unassuming students on the HU and OC campuses… To be honest, I’m not quite sure when my baby sister grew up, but you did…. And we all get to bear witness to that beautiful and mysterious work of God today! You are truly gorgeous….

I want the two of you to take just a minute and look around this room. Seriously, just look around. Don’t be shy…. You are joined today by people who love you, who have come to celebrate with you and share in this covenant and who by their own presence promise to help you honor one another and keep the vows you are making today.

K, you’ve had a lot of practice getting ready for days like today. I still remember like it was yesterday, all of the surprise parties that you and KA would plan behind the scenes in 2 & 3 grade. I mean, how could Mrs. Gary really resist, much less shut down, all those parties you threw in “her honor”? You’ve been planning and throwing parties a long time, and this one is the biggest yet!

And this party has been a long time coming, hasn’t it. I’m not sure that either of you could have ever imagined the journeys that brought you to this day. K, when you were planning all those parties in 3rd grade, could you ever have imagined all that’s happened in the past twenty years? N, could you?

Fairytale or Gospel?

And looking here at the two of you is sort of a fairytale experience. You both look incredible. The whole picture is almost surreal. N, you clean up pretty well now, don’t you? And K, in my lifetime I’ve only seen one bride more enchanting than you!

The scene is perfect… gathered by a lovely court of attendants… the candles lit with gentle flames romantically dancing… the flowers splashing the space with a perfect palette of color and leaving a hint of the fragrance of love wafting through the air…. Yes, this is fairytale type stuff.
But then, I’m not much for fairytales…. I know that probably sounds a bit stuffy, like I’m a crotchety ole cynic at the age of 35. I mean, I’m the father of two little girls for goodness’ sake. You’d think I’d have a Walt Disney kind-o’-heart.

But here’s the thing. I may be a cynic, but I’m a hopeful cynic. I just don’t think that fairytales get the story quite right for me. In fact, I think they tell it all wrong. They aren’t beautiful enough. They aren’t profound enough. And they just don’t get the ending right.

I guess that is one of the reasons we’ve heard this rather strange text from Paul today. I love the heart of Paul’s language in this passage…. “We have this brilliant treasure of God in fragile clay jars, so that it may be clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us…. We are always carrying around the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.” You see, for me fairytales have this false assumption that this moment is the best there ever is or will be, that the shimmer and shine is eternal, that the brilliance and beauty of this moment reigns supreme.

Fairytales don’t take the journey of the past seriously enough…. The fairy tales would have us believe that today is the ultimate escape from the past. In fairytales the struggles of life aren’t beautiful enough, so they must be overcome and forgotten. They just can’t imagine that there is anything redemptive there. But we don’t gather today in spite of life’s struggles, hardships, and trials. In fact we’ve come to celebrate them. They are a part of the ongoing presence and faithfulness of God throughout both of your lives, preparing you for this very moment. Everything from the past is vital to today. God’s good news is that every bump, blip, and breakdown is transformed and redeemed because of the Spirit’s powerful presence with us. In fact, Paul dares us to imagine that it is actually through the cracks, through the places of our brokenness and fragility that the glorious light of God’s Spirit shines through us most powerfully. So we celebrate every moment of the past today!

Fairytales don’t take the future seriously enough either…. For the fairytales, there’s not much more to the story after this. From here on, it’s just a sunset and a “happily ever after.” But for us, this isn’t the pinnacle. No, this is only one moment in time. It’s a beautiful moment, for sure; and it’s a vital moment, or we wouldn’t all be celebrating with you today. But it’s far more important than the fairy tales would have us believe. We are here today because we believe that this is a holy moment, a sacramental moment. God is here. God is doing something. God is starting something. It’s not the end of this tale. It’s more like a new beginning.

Today we cling to the promise that God isn’t content with a “happily ever after,” but longs to transform you and to change the world through you! We recognize and celebrate the beauty of this moment, but we do it because we recognize the presence and work of God here.
So we don’t deny the reality of the tough journeys that have brought you here and we don’t just sugar coat what is ahead. Instead, we remember and celebrate that God is present in every moment, holding you both together, refusing to let you be crushed,… driven to despair,… forsaken,… or destroyed…. But promising to hold you together through the Spirit.

And that is why both everything that has brought you to this point and everything that happens from here is so important. Today, you pledge to live as witnesses of this story, a living letter of this incredibly good news. You covenant to one another to live lives of rich integrity for each other’s sake. You refuse to throw in the towel…. You refuse proclaim yourselves as most important…. You choose the way of radical honesty and humility….

This can be a strange way of living in a world that wants to look out for its own interests and advantage above most anything else. But today you pledge to live to the rhythms of a very different wisdom, the way of Christ’s cruciform love….

I know that this could be a bit overwhelming, especially in the toughest of moments, when everything inside of you is fighting the call to empty yourself and serve one another, when the temptation for self-preservation and looking out for your own interest seems too strong to avoid. But don’t despair for you are never doing it alone. God is working in you, partnering with you, pouring God’s own life into you, so that the light of new creation shines brilliantly into darkness!!!

There will be times when you may not feel the giddiness and emotion that you do today. There will be moments, and they’ll come soon enough, when you won’t feel like loving each other. There will be moments when you want to manipulate things or assert your own will to get your way. But especially in those moments, trust in the economy of God, who is constantly working, to redeem and resurrect things according to God’s ultimate purposes. Believe that you can still give of yourselves freely to one another because you affirm God’s continued care and activity in your own lives and you trust in the surprising and grace-filled work of God that is continually breaking in all around you. You are participating in the very life of God, so you can give of yourselves with reckless abandon.

And that brings us back to where our Scripture started today. As you partner with God for one another’s sake, you can also be sure that God is making you holy! At times it may be imperceptible. But marriage is a crucible of holiness and the Spirit is always there, doing God’s transformative work. And nothing in a fairytale ending comes close to matching that. This isn’t just “happily ever after”… this is transformation together into the image and likeness of God!

It may seem like foolishness, but by choosing to become slaves of Christ for one another today, you are embracing the ultimate freedom. You are opening your life so fully to one another in the Lord that the Spirit can transform both of you into the image of God day after day and from one degree of glory to the next…. As you give of yourselves in love for each other, God’s creative light will shine from your hearts as it shined out of darkness at the dawn of creation. People will be compelled by the awe-inspiring image of the Trinity that is lived out between you. And you will partner with God together in the healing and redemption of the world!

So always remember… please, never forget. For all of the beauty and elegance and perfection of this moment, today isn’t a fairytale…. No, that just wouldn’t do justice to today. Today is no fairytale… today is God’s work, today is gospel!

Hope in the Midst of Despair

2010-08-13T08:49:00.002-04:00

I’m sitting at Panera Bread right now, doing some tweaking on the wedding ceremony I’ll be performing tomorrow. It’s my second wedding to perform in a week. On the Friday evening of Mission: Possible, N and I had the privilege of performing a ceremony in Flint. It was a holy moment for us, celebrating and blessing the marriage of a couple we’ve watched grow together from their first date till now. Tomorrow I have the arduous task of performing my sister’s wedding. What an incredible gift and honor to participate in my baby sister’s special day! (Of course, I’m pretty sure that there is no humanly possible way I’ll make it through without some serious waterworks. The trifecta of watching N, then MJ, then my sister gracefully glide down the aisle will be too much to humanly bear!)

All of this makes me reflect on a conversation that I had during Mission: Possible this year. I was talking with someone about the blessing of having so many young families at Lake Orion. They responded by saying something like, “I’ve got to hand it to all of you. I’m not sure how you do it.” “How we do what?” “How you keep having kids in today’s world. It’s a pretty scary thing to think about raising kids today.”

On the one hand, there is something to that statement. The world is changing. Much of the confidence that people have felt in the past has been shaken. Assurance has been traded for doubt. Confidence and security swapped for anxiety and doubt. On the other hand, though, we are a gospelled people! Our lives are shaped by the confidence we have that, in spite of what our eyes might see, God is up to something incredible in the world. God continues to bring about new life, new hope, new creation. We believe that God is redeeming and reconciling all things in Christ Jesus (Col 1:20).

This faith, this belief that God is doing a new thing even in the midst of troubling and trying times, isn’t a new challenge. We are not the first people to wrestle with doubt. Throughout scripture we see God’s people struggling in places that bring them to the brink of paralyzing despair. It was into one of those seasons that Jeremiah wrote to a community of exiles:

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare (Jer 29:5-7).

Building houses, planting gardens, getting married, and having children…all are a powerful, prophetic witness to a despairing world that we are a people of hope. We believe and trust that God is up to something in this world, and so we refuse to give in to despair. We dare to live life to the full, not simply for ourselves but for the welfare of our city and for the sake of the world!

Advent Conspiracy

2009-11-29T17:16:00.002-05:00

In case you managed to avoid the practice in manufactured desire that is Black Friday, you might consider this as a supplement or an alternative to traditional Christmas shopping and spending.

Cultivating Thanksgiving in a Forgetful World

2009-11-23T10:13:00.003-05:00

Sermon for Oxford-Orion Area Ecumenical Thanksgiving Service
22 November 2009
OT Reading: Deuteronomy 6:4-15 (16), 20-25
NT Reading: Colossians 3:1-17
Psalter Reading: Psalm 107

“When the Lord your God has brought you into the land that he swore to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you—a land with fine, large cities that you did not build, houses filled with all sorts of goods that you did not fill, hewn cisterns that you did not hew, vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant—and when you have eaten your fill, take care that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. He brought us out from there in order to bring us in…” (Deuteronomy 6:10-12, 23a)

Every year at this time Christians from Oxford and Orion come together to give thanks. In a divided and divisive world we come together to celebrate the unity that we share through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. In a hostile and violent world we come together to give honor to the One who took up the cross to reconcile us all to God and to one another and bring true peace to the world. In a broken and fractured world we come together to rejoice that God’s new creation is breaking in and healing a creation that groans for redemption.

We come to celebrate the strange generosity of God’s provision that abides with us in the loving and serving help of a stranger, the warm smile and greeting of a neighbor, and both the simplest meal and most lavish spread on our tables, shared with family and friends. We come together to give thanks, so we come together to remember because our thanksgiving to God is always rooted in memories.
We come tonight to remember and give thanks to the faithful, generous, sustaining, nourishing work of the Creator… But if we honest with one another tonight, it can be hard to give thanks, for we’re far too prone to forget God’s faithfulness. It seems that everything in our society conspires against thanksgiving because, whether in want or plenty, whether in good times or bad, we have little space in our lives to cultivate and nurture our memories of God’s faithfulness.

SCARCITY:
It’s hard to give thanks when things are bad, when it seems that we are wandering in a wilderness wasteland…. It’s hard to give thanks when things are bad, for we’re far too prone to forget.

Sometimes we are like the Israelites at Massah and Meribah. We long for water to drink. Sometimes, even while our hands are still gathering an omer of manna and catching quail, we wonder if the Lord is among us or not. We quarrel and complain and test the One who delivers us, who sates our hunger and quenches our thirst….”(Exodus 16-17)…. It’s hard to give thanks when things are bad; we’re far too prone to forget.
Sometimes the fig tree does not blossom, no fruit is on the vine, the produce of the olive fails, and the fields struggle to yield their crop under mild temperatures and overcast skies. Sometimes the flock is cut off from the fold and there is no herd in the stalls (Habakkuk 3: 17ff.)…. It’s hard to give thanks when things are bad, for we’re far too prone to forget.

Sometimes the stability of our world seems to give way… The economic empires we’ve come to trust crumble and our homes and our retirement accounts, our “hope for the future,” swiftly shrink away. Our jobs hang in the balance, not because of our performance but on the whim of forces that are constantly out of our control. We stand for hours in lines to receive food, baby formula, and Christmas gifts for our children. Our lives are riddled by sickness and disease. We sit beside the beds of loved ones, helpless but longing to help, as they are victimized by disease and old age. When we are pounded by death and despair, when we are shaken by war, terror, and fear, when our families disintegrating, or when lavish thanksgiving feasts become simple, humble meals, it can be hard to give thanks….

It’s hard to give thanks when things are bad, for we’re far too prone to forget.

ABUNDANCE:
But it’s also hard to give thanks when things are good, when milk and honey flow freely and the grape clusters are too large to carry. It’s hard to give thanks when things are good, for we’re far too prone to forget.

Sometimes we find ourselves living in a rich, new land filled with unthinkable resources, a land of great promise, with large cities that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we did not build, with houses filled with all sorts of goods that we did not provide, hewn cisterns that we did not hew, plump vineyards and olive groves that we did not plant…. It’s hard to give thanks when things are good, for we’re far too prone to forget.

Sometimes we suffer from the “complacency of success.” We forget God, thinking that we don’t need him. We build bigger and bigger barns to hold our banner crops. We watch as promotions come, our houses grow, our bank accounts thrive, and our anxiety about life seems to pass away. We have a tendency toward self-reliance, toward self-sufficiency, toward self-congratulation and praise. Our cups overflow; our tables are filled with a rich feast, but we exalt ourselves rather than the God who is the source of all good gifts…. It’s hard to give thanks when things are good; we’re far too prone to forget.
Sometimes we suffer under discontentment. It’s hard to remember rightly in a culture that manufactures desire and demands instant gratification. Instead of gratitude for our blessings, we are trained to see and want what we don’t have, the newer, the flashier, the latest…. We already see signs of the holiday sales madness that begins right on the cusp of this Thanksgiving season. Long before we sit at our tables on Thursday to give thanks for God’s faithfulness and provision, we have already devised our shopping plans for “Black Friday”….

It’s hard to give thanks when things are good, for we’re far too prone to forget.

CULTIVATING THANKSGIVING:
But today we do come to give thanks, and thanksgiving is always ground in remembering rightly. Our gratitude and our reverence spring from an awareness of something that reminds us of our human limitations, of something that is beyond our full comprehension, of something that can’t be controlled or changed by our manipulation, of something that is transcendent. We must realize that we are neither the source nor the cause, but the recipients of life through Divine grace. We must remember that God is with us, and God has taken the initiative to provide and care for us.

To cultivate thanksgiving in a forgetful world, we must remember. We remember by telling and listening to stories: stories of God’s faithfulness, stories of God’s provision, stories of God’s grace. This is one of the gifts of children. They love to ask the questions that inspire our memories, and they love to listen to the stories we share. We tell the stories of the God who delivers us, who fills the hungry with manna that blankets the wilderness ground and satisfies the thirsty with life-giving water that flows from a rock. We tell the stories of the God who brings us out of darkness and gloom, who breaks our bonds asunder. We remember the God who sends out his word and heals our sickness, who delivers us from destruction. We remember the one who calms the chaotic waters of our lives and, with just a word, hushes the waves of the sea.

As we remember rightly, our thanksgiving flows freely, and that thanksgiving inspires both hope and humility. Hope in the faithful God who is at the heart of our stories and humility as those who have received graciously from him. Hope and humility empower us to live in trust and faithfulness. Faithfulness and trust cultivate an awareness of God’s work in the world and in our own lives, his strange but always faithful, generous, sustaining, and nourishing work. And that awareness of God’s generous provision gives us new stories to remember, stories that overflow in thanksgiving….
And so the cycle starts all over again: our memories flow into thanksgiving, which inspires hope and humility, which empowers trust and faithfulness, which cultivates an awareness of God’s gracious provision, which flows into new stories about God.…

At times we can forget that our stories really are not about ourselves but God. God is the heart of our lives and our stories. So let us start, now, to cultivate hearts of thanksgiving by telling stories of God. Let us recite them to our children and talk about them when we lie down and when we rise. Let us share them with one another when we are at home and when we are walking and driving about.

And maybe we can start this week by sharing our stories with one another at the table. In this season of food, family, and football, may we gather around our tables and remember. May we tell the stories that keep us grounded securely in God’s faithfulness throughout history, but may we also celebrate our smaller, more personal encounters with God’s steadfast love and faithfulness in our families and in our own lives…. May we remember the God who sees us, the God who is always present with us, the God who provides… and as we remember, may the Spirit make us people who give thanks!

“(Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body.) And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col 3:15b-17).

When the Storyteller Loses His Tale

2009-11-06T07:48:00.000-05:00

I can still feel the breeze tickling my face. My ears echo with the low, constant hum of the flat bottom rowboat cutting through the glass-like water. I can hear the metronomic rhythm of the oars breaking into and tearing through the water, so perfectly that an orchestra could keep time with their waving and beat. We are breaking the halfway point; the far side shore is now closer than the little gravel dock we used to launch the little, Army green vessel. The little trailer that has been our home for the past two nights now looks more like something from a Matchbox set than last night’s bed. From here the wildly verdant woodland, just inland from the small, sandy beach, looks tame, almost placid and inviting. But then, somewhere deep inside, I start to hear the beat. Boom…boom…boom-boom…boom…boom…boom-boom…boom…. The sounds of drums, of frenzied, native tribesmen begin to fill me ears. As the bushes move and branches shift, I try in vain to blame it on the brisk gusts of wind that just ushered in the ominous clouds overhead. I remember the stories he told me the night before, the “bedtime” tales around the campfire. “Do you think they see us?” His voice pierces the nervous silence and cinches the vice grips that are already locked onto my stomach. As the oars continue to turn, the little dinghy creeps closer to the sand and rocks. “Turn around! Don’t take us to the shore!” My voices cracks in desperation, knowing what lurks in the shadows on the land ahead. And he knows. He was the one who told me about the frenetic natives on this side of the lake. He thumped out their devilish drumbeat on the empty Maxwell House can. How can he not be afraid? How can he not be paralyzed by fear? But his arms keep rowing the oars with a methodical confidence. He rows with the confidence of one who knows that his imagination dictates our fate, that the final chapter of this saga is yet to be penned. He is the storyteller.

I can’t help but think about memories like these at this time of year. Today, November 1, would be my grandfather’s birthday. It was five years ago this Thanksgiving that, just a month after arriving in Michigan, Natalie and I headed to Wichita, Kansas, to say goodbye to my grandfather, the greatest storyteller I have known. But a long battle with Parkinson’s and dementia had taken a heavy toll on my grandfather, not to mention the chronic mouth pain the forced him to retire from the pulpit far too early and muted his stories when we were together at the holidays. As I sat alone watching him struggle toward eternal sleep in the hospice unit, I realized that after a life full of imagination the storyteller had lost his story.

There is something about knowing and telling a story that instills confidence and hope. As I sat in that dinghy with my grandfather, bewildered by the unknown on the other side of the lake, I was anxious, frightened. My grandfather was calm, cool, collected. As the storyteller, he knew what was ahead, what was waiting on the approaching shore. As I sat by his bed that November night, I realized that we had exchanged places. This faithful servant of God had lost his story, but he had helped teach it to me. I spent that night fumbling between prayer, reminiscence, and storytelling. As he lay unresponsive in bed I retold him story of God that he’d been faithful to live and proclaim to people for so many years. At that moment, I had to have confidence for him, trusting that his real story, which was really God’s unfolding story, was true and that together we could continue to row with a methodical confidence to the other shore.

The church is a story-formed people. We believe that we have been written into the unfolding story of God that began at creation and is moving toward new creation. That story must give shape to our lives, give us hope, instill courage, liberate us in the freedom of faith. Everything that we do, both in worship and in our lives in the world, must be a faithful reflection and embodiment of God’s story. Sometimes, though, when I listen to our conversations over pattern, form, and preference, I wonder if the church has lost her story, exchanged its adventure and engagement for a defensiveness that seeks to preserve past forms rather than the story that gives them meaning. For the church to row faithfully and confidently through the seas of our times, we must recapture the imagination of God’s story, moving steadily with the master storyteller as the final chapter of this saga is penned in and through us. May God give us the adventurous courage to jump into God’s boat.

Twelve Titleists, No Boyfriend, and the Future Horizon of Hope

2009-10-16T06:55:00.001-04:00

It's been a busy and frustrating week. I am swimming in doctoral deadlines, have lots of things happening at work, and have been fighting a bronchial infection. But, I heard this piece this morning on StoryCorps on NPR and thought, "That's Gospel!" That is what a community of hope and new possibility looks like. I'm not sure if it was the story or the stresses of this, but listening brought tears to my eyes. Hope you enjoy.

Andrew DeVries

Shared via AddThis

Hope and Despair in Motown...

2009-09-18T15:18:00.003-04:00

I live life wandering around an area that is in a lot of pain, longing for hope but feeling mostly despair. Unemployment rates were updated recently and the numbers for Michigan top the national chart, for Detroit they are astounding. At 15.2% the state is 2 full points ahead (not sure if I like that word) of Nevada, which holds the penultimate position on the list. Detroit currently sits at an umeployment rate of 28.9%, a truly astronomical number.

A gospel that does not take this seriously, that does not somehow proclaim "good news" to and in this situation is a wanting gospel. A gospel that only pats the suffering on the back and promises "spiritual blessing" is an escapist and Gnostic gospel that has little connection with the God made manifest in the incarnation, the God who met and bore the world's suffering in the cross.

If that last paragraph is right, what is the message that we proclaim? What stories do we tell? How do we chose to live? How do we comport ourselves to proclaim and embody a bigger gospel? What news is good today? How does the "horizon of hope" begin to intersect the horizon of our despair? (Ala Moltmann?)

(This is me, seeking the wisdom of my virtual CIJ.)

The Plague...

2009-09-16T16:16:00.010-04:00

I hope to post more on this later, but I am pressed for time right now. I do want to point any of you out there to a couple of thought provoking articles, especially as the church thinks about its life in the world.

Houses Of Worship Open Doors To Swine Flu

How To Say 'Hi' In An H1N1 World

I wonder whether the church will respond as Camus' Dr. Rieux or Fr. Paneloux. Maybe we should revisit our early church history.

Welcoming the Stranger and Cultivating Compassion in a World of Fear

2009-09-16T08:36:00.003-04:00

Friday morning a woman walked up to me and gave me a piece of paper with a kind note and a copy of this image, Eichenberg's "Christ of the Breadlines" We had been together at a session on Welcoming the Stranger at the Moltmann Conversation hosted by Emergent Village. She was not a registered conference attender, just a woman from Libertyville Presbyterian Church, where the conference convened. She listened to us, and even chimed in periodically, wrestle together to think about how to cultivate welcome and compassion in a world that treats fear as a commodity.

Eichenberg's woodcut is a powerful reminder that it is in the midst of strangers and outcasts that we are most likely to encounter Christ. If that's the case, how do we welcome strangers and cultivate compassion in a world of fear? How can we restore their broken humanity? (I think that it must be more than simply giving them handouts, but I need your help.)

How can the church, who claims to be the living presence of Jesus in the world, meet the living presence of Jesus in the stranger?

Living into God's Promised Future

2009-09-13T13:31:00.004-04:00

Over the past several weeks, things have been moving and changing around our household. Our family's awaiting of our next addition has been the major catalyst of it all. N is already starting some of the creative rethinking about our house. We love our condo, but it's a small space, so we are measuring rooms and baby furniture and imagining how everything will fit together into a perfect workable space, sort of like Tetris pieces as they slowly fall from the top of the screen to meet the other pieces at the bottom. It is giving us a chance to simplify even more, to bless others with items we've collected over the years, and to thank God for a space that we can call home.

The biggest changes, though, haven't been with our place but with M. Since finding out that we are anxiously expecting a new face around the house, she's been quickly trying to grow into her new role. For those of you who follow some of these Magnusson-family-moments, you know that one of the major changes has been in M's interest in potty training. Last week she went five straight days without an accident, day or night. It was such a great streak of success that N dared to forego the diaper one night and let her stay in her "big girl" clothes. Like a clutch hitter moving into October, she kept he streak alive. She was dry, the bed was dry, and there was much joy in Mudville.

That morning N posted this major feat on her wall, anxious to share the news with several hundred of her closest "friends." Jeanne Kilgore quickly commented: "Oh, how great that is. She is getting ready to be that big sister!!" I've spent a lot of time reflecting on that statement over the past week. There is so much truth there, not just about the leaps and bounds my little girl is making each day as she grows up, but about the Christian life.

Think about this. The reality of M being a "big sis" is on the horizon, but not yet a reality. Right now it's only promise that she has to trust. There are small signs on the horizon right now. She experiences our excitement. She can look at the little peanut in our first ultrasound picture. She can see the a little baby bump steadily growing on mommy's tummy. She is anxiously awaiting a new reality that she knows is on the horizon.

But, with all of the excitement, she really has very little idea what she is waiting for. She's now living into this new reality, this promise, but she really has almost no understanding of what it will look like. She watches and imitates her friend G, seeing how she lives as a big sister, but it's still hard to grasp fully the reality of the future that is on the horizon for our family. Sounds a lot like our faith in God's future.

As the people of God, we trust in God's promises to restore and reconcile all of creation. We long for new creation, a new heaven and a new earth. We anxiously await the coming of God's righteousness and justice, of a time of peace for all people, of reconciliation, of joy. Right now, though, we only see glimmers of this future. We come to Scripture to hear God’s promises again and we, like M, are getting ready for what is to come. That doesn't mean that we passively wait for heaven to come. No, it means that we actively partner with God to bring about God's promised vision for the world. That promise sets us on a road that leads to another land, to another reality. We step boldly and hopefully into the future, so that the promises of God that are on the horizon continue to move steadily closer to becoming a reality, to meet the horizon of our lives, in our community, and in our world.

MI Neighborhood Food Movers

2009-08-26T09:01:00.002-04:00

I have been incredibly moved (no pun intended) by recent press about this new initiative that the Governor is piloting in the Detroit area. I hope that it takes root and grows (ok, pun intended) in the city and becomes a model for the rest of the impoverished areas in the state. I also hope that it will prove to be a blessing to local farmers who are also struggling right now.

You can read about it the Free Press and Michigan Radio (NPR).

The MNFM is an exciting possibility for the residents of Detroit and for local farmers. Something as simple as good quality and accessible fresh produce is a major step toward hope and new imagination, not to mention justice and health. I hope that this is a blessing and spreads to other hurting areas of the state.

Mission: Possible

2009-08-04T15:32:00.000-04:00

Just a little taste of what we were up to last week!

Losing My Religion for Equality

2009-07-21T09:30:00.003-04:00

Here's a wonderful little piece by Jimmy Carter ("Losing My Religion for Equality") on his recent decision to leave the Southern Baptist Convention after 60 years because of his disagreement with their theology on the place and role of women in the community of faith.

Wishing God Had a Name

2009-07-16T22:42:00.003-04:00

So, I'm full of questions and invites today. (Note: I originally wrote this post yesterday!)

I'm considering working on a piece with a couple of friends about God. See, I think I wish that gods still had names. I hear a lot of "god-talk" in churches, in the news, in pop culture, and in society, but I'm not sure all of this talk, even when it's supposedly 'Christian' conversation, is about the God who is revealed in Jesus. It think it might be easier to differentiate between these gods if gods still had proper names.

So, I would love to hear some reflections on "god." When you hear people talking about God or when you talk about God yourself, what does that God look like? What does that God do? How does that God reveal Godself to people and to the world? What does that God value or think is important? What is that God's end purpose, dream, and goal for humanity and creation?

Consider this a little language and assumption audit. Thanks for indulging me.

While you're thinking, you might think about this different definitions of "God" the Regina Spektor explores in her powerful and probing song "Laughing with":

Two ways of thinking

2009-07-15T17:18:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I heard two legal specialists reflecting and dialoguing on the Sotomayor confirmation hearings. The two perspectives expressed in the conversation were quite different, as you can imagine in such a discussion. In the light of many other conversations I've been having and reading lately, I've been pondering the import of the perspectives for conversations that happen in the Churches of Christ. Here were the two perspectives as best I can capture them. (I tried to jot notes down while heading west on Square Lake yesterday, so I'm attempting to do justice to each in a very compact way. I know that doesn't allow for nuance, but indulge me! :-) )

Perspective 1. We must attend to the "literal words of the text. Read the text as it is and don't give voice to "discrete, insular minorities."

Perspective 2. "Fidelity to a text doesn't answer all of the hard cases" of real life situtions.

When you consider discussions and diaolgues in communities of faith, where do you find yourself? Which perspective sounds more like your own? What would it look like if you adopted the other perspective? How do you engage those who hold the perspective that is not your own? Where is God in the midst of the perspectives and the conversation? Where do you see glimpses or shadows the God who is revealed in Scripture in both perspectives? (Try to be fair and do justice to both sides.)

Moments of terror, moments of beauty, moments of transformation

2009-07-15T13:51:00.004-04:00

There are moments in life are truly holy. Sometimes those moments come with a fury of terror. A midnight knock on the door by a state deputy. An unwelcomed meeting with a supervisor. A call from family that begins with "I want you to know that we're okay, but...." A twister the demolishes all that that dares to stand in its path. These moments shock us into a turbulent whirlpool of chaos, shattering our past assumptions about life, about people, about creation, about God.

Sometimes those moments come in an encounter with overwhelming beauty. On a cliff overlooking the grandeur and power of the first cataract at Victoria Falls with your dad and cousins. Listening to a virtuoso performance of a majestic score for the first time. Sitting in an old graveyard sharing life with your best friends. Watching the unmatchable beauty of the woman who said "yes" break through the doors at the back of a sanctuary and choose to make her way down the aisle toward you. A newborn creeping its way to suckle for the first time from its mother's breast. These moments shock us into a turbulent whirlpool of chaos, shattering our past assumptions about life, about people, about creation, about God.

Sometimes the moments of beauty and the moments of terror are closely liked; sometimes the mountaintop and valley are miles away. But whatever the case, they are moments of change, of transformation. Though somethings return to "normal" (whatever that is), in so many ways we will never be the same. These moments shock us into a turbulent whirlpool of chaos, shattering our past assumptions about life, about people, about creation, about God.

The Lives of Others, one of the best movies that I've seen recently, has a scene where terror and beauty collide in a moment of transformation for all who bear witness to it. Shortly after receiving a shattering call that his friend had lost hope and committed suicide, Dreyman a play write in Eastern Germany, plays "Sonata for a Good Man." Wiesler, a member of the GDR Stasi, is listening through a tapped line as terror and beauty collide in a moment of transformation. (I wish I could write more about it, but it's all I can do to just get put this down right now.):

"Can anyone who has heard this music, I mean truly heard it, really be a bad person?” I'm captivated by that line. ""Can anyone who has heard this music, I mean truly heard it, really be a bad person?”

What about you? What moments in your life have been moments of transformation? What did they teach you about God, about creation, about life, about "others"? How have you been changed because of the experience?

The Mysterious and Unmanageable Kingdom of God (Mk 4:26-32)

2009-07-08T15:31:00.002-04:00

Sermon manuscript from 5 July 2009

Welcome

Children:
Bring the kids up front and reading Kingdom parables:

Come on up. Have a seat wherever you want. It is all yours.

Where should I sit? Do you want to see the pictures? You do? Alright, is this good? Alright. Perfect.

This is a story called “A Tiny Seed and a Big Tree”

“Many people came to hear Jesus’ stories. Jesus told stories about God’s kingdom. And wherever God is king, God’s love will be found.” Do you see the people coming and sitting to listen to Jesus?

“Jesus said, ‘God’s kingdom is like a mustard seed. It’s one of the smallest, tiniest seeds in the world, but it grows and it grows and it grows and it grows. And when it’s grown, it’s one of the biggest plants in the garden. It’s so big that birds come and rest in its branches. And God’s kingdom can start very small, just like that. God’s love may only be in one person’s heart, but when his love is shared, his kingdom grows and grows and grows. And more and more people want to follow God.’

“And then Jesus told another story. ‘God’s kingdom is like yeast. Bakers use yeast to make dough puff up and get really big. It makes the dough soft and fluffy, then you can make great loaves of bread.’ Jesus said, ‘God’s kingdom is like yeast. A woman mixes the yeast with the flour. She makes the dough and the yeast gets worked through all of the dough and it makes the dough big and puffy. God’s love can start like yeast. It can mix into our hearts, and there it grows bigger and bigger and soon we have enough love to share with everyone.’”

Huh, so God’s kingdom, Jesus says, is wherever God is king. And wherever God is king, we will see God’s love. So I’m wondering, can any of you tell me a time when you were able to show God’s love to somebody else? What do you think? Has there ever been a time like that?

Remember that wherever God is king, you’ll see God’s love. So today what I want you to do is make sure to show God’s love to everyone you see. Then, God’s kingdom will be just like that little bitty mustard seed. It will grow bigger and bigger and bigger. And it will be just like that little bit of yeast that makes the dough puff up really big and make a nice, fluffy loaf of bread.

Kids head back to their seats.

Let’s hear the Word of the Lord this morning as we begin:

Mark 4:26-32 (tNIV)
“Jesus said to the crowd that gathered, ‘This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.’

“Again he said, ‘What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds can perch in its shade.’”

Prayer – “God, today we step once again into an ancient text, but a story that lives with more power, with more meaning, and with more import than most any other text we know. And so God we pray that you will help this text to live anew in our hearts and in our lives, that we can be drawn into your life, that we can live under your reign as people of your kingdom, and that through us that kingdom will be realized in the world. It is through the name of your son that we pray. Amen.”

Well, today we find ourselves in the gospel of Mark. The gospel of Mark is an interesting one. At least I think it is. It’s interesting for a lot of reasons, but one of the most interesting is that Mark’s gospel just wears me out. I confessed this a couple of weeks ago on Wednesday night. Mark’s gospel wears me out because, even though, it is by far the shortest of the four gospels in our Bibles, Mark sprints through the first 9 chapters at breakneck pace. Mark opens his gospel with these powerful and really deeply loaded words. He writes, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus…, Messiah…, Son of God.” That simple, but deeply loaded, first sentence is like Mark’s call to the starting blocks. When I read it I get these nervous twitches in my body like I am back running high school track again, and I have to start shaking out the legs and getting ready to get in the blocks and steady my hands starting line, and anxiously wait, because I know that as soon as Mark finishes those words we are off to the race. The gun is going to fire and we are going to go. As soon as he finishes those words, we hear the bang and we “immediately”, one of Mark’s favorite words, move from one story to the next, one telling about miraculous healings, to the next encounter with demons, to the next controversy with religious leaders, and even to short, very short times of silent prayer. We think the prayer is a reprieve, but it’s just to drive us back into another very quick story.

As a sprinter though, I would like to think of it as a 100-meter dash, because I liked that race. It was quick. I was alright getting out of the blocks and I was fast. But I think that Mark is a little bit more like the 400-meter dash. I hated that one, because for me, being a short distance sprinter, it seemed like it took an eternity. I felt like I was just constantly going and just wanted to die after that race. (Joke with AH, a gifted cross-country runner.)

As you race through Mark, you discover that there is definitely a lot of action. Mark’s Jesus is not so much about talking the talk as walking the walk. Most of Jesus’ teaching, especially in these first nine chapters is in response to questions, in response to doubts, and in response to challenges from other people. There are very few long teaching segments like you get in the other Gospels. In fact, at times you desperately want them, so you can just slow down a little bit. This is really interesting to me, especially since Mark’s gospel is probably the earliest gospel we have in our Bibles. It was the earliest one written. So, Mark’s approach to telling the story about Jesus is his own choice. There are a lot of other stories about Jesus and what Jesus did out there. I mean we know this from the end of the gospel of John, right. There, John says, “Jesus did a whole lot of other things that I didn’t include…” So, when we read Mark, one of the questions we ask is “why do we keep running from one thing to the next when we could slow down?” But, Mark seems to have been the first to attempt to tell the story of Jesus’ life in a way that shaped his community to understand who God is, to understand Jesus’ life and ministry, and to come to find their own place in the reign of God. He could have focused primarily on Jesus’ teaching, but instead focused on short vignettes of Jesus’ actions to help his church family discover what it means to be Jesus’ disciple, his “learner”

Chapter 4:
And so, it is in this mix of these short, quick, changing vignettes that chapter 4 breaks in abruptly. It begins, “Again he began to teach beside the sea.” Now, that’s not surprising to us. It’s not teaching by the sea that’s unique. If we have been following Mark since chapter 1, we know that Jesus has taught people by the sea several times. But each time it’s just been for the briefest of moments, just to transition into another action, but here, all of a sudden, Jesus starts telling these convoluted parables that are in some ways meant to confuse people, meant to be shrouded in mystery, as he says in verse 12.

Now, why, if Mark wants to have Jesus teaching, doesn’t he use something that makes a little more sense? Why this teaching? Why these parables? Why doesn’t he use something from the Sermon on the Mount, like the Beatitudes, or maybe one of the long teaching sections from that we see in the John. Why these parables? If this is all that Jesus is going to say to us in these first nine chapters, why these parables? What is going on?

But as much as I would like to dictate and provide a few editorial suggestions to Mark, he doesn’t take my advice. Mark thinks that the most important thing for us to hear Jesus teach right now is these mysterious parables on the kingdom.

The parables go against every sensibility and rational desire we have. We tend to be people who like to plan, to organize, to think through things and have everything nicely mapped out. But here, in contrast to our desire to control, the kingdom of God is more a mystery than something we master. We, like the sower, are called simply to scatter seeds, rather than control and manipulate its growth.

When we were talking about these parables a couple of Wednesday nights ago, Ken acutely put his finger on the uncomfortable tension in these parables well, at least the one that I have. He basically said, “If I were the sower, I would make sure that the seed fell right where I wanted it to. I would dig a nice little hole and plant it right there and make sure it grows.”

I like that idea, because it puts me in control. It keeps things under my grasp. It makes it so that things work according to my plans. I think that Ken’s sentiment is not a unique feeling. Most of us want to control and master the growth. We want to manage and artificially manipulate the results and the growth of the crop.

But that wisdom is not the wisdom of the Kingdom in Mark’s gospel. In Mark, we see Jesus scattering the seed of the kingdom, pieces of his very own life, into the lives of others. As Jesus’ disciples, as his learners, we pattern our lives after his. We scatter pieces of our own lives, the seed of the kingdom, into the lives of others, and then sleep and rise and watch, trusting that we are participating in the mystery of the kingdom of God.

Father Joe:

As I was thinking about these parables, a book came to mind. I was in seminary at ACU when Randy Harris suggested that I read Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul by Tony Hendra. The book was a surprising best seller here in the U.S. It is basically Hendra’s spiritual autobiography. Some of you may know Hendra’s name, others may not. Tony Hendra was one of the scriptwriters for Spitting Image, which someone called the most uninhibitedly scurrilous and outspoken satirical program on British television in the 1980s. That basically means that it was an unhibited, no-holds-barred attack on whatever was out there. There was nothing that it left as sacred. He wrote for National Lampoon and played Ian Faith in the brilliant spoof rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap.

In the book, Hendra describes his friendship with a Benedictine monk named Father Joe. Their friendship started under the most awkward of circumstances when Hendra was 14. Father Joe was a monk in a community called Quarr and, since making his vows and commitment, he had hardly ever left the grounds of his monastery on the Isle of Wright. During the next forty years, as Hendra’s life and career drastically ebbed and flowed, he discovered that his visits to Father Joe remained the one constant in his life. It was the one relationship that, in the most serious sense, saved it. During those four decades, Father Joe remained a constant, a point of utterly reliable orientation for Hendra, accessible and compassionate through crises of faith, through successes and failures, marriage and divorce and remarriage, problems with drugs and alcohol, and even an attempted suicide. (fr. Father Joe and Tokens of Trust)

Through those years Father Joe never tried to score points with Hendra. He never tried to manipulate growth in Hendra’s life. Instead he constantly sowed small seeds of himself, really seeds of the kingdom of God, into the soil of Hendra’s life, seeds that patiently punctured through all of the illusions and ambitions of his heart and took root in his soul, and slowly called Hendra back to God. Father Joe knew he couldn’t control or manage the way the kingdom of God grew, but he faithfully scattered the seeds of his own life, the seeds of the kingdom.

The kingdom of God is like a man who scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or rises, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how.

JP:
J, it reminds me a little of the story that we were talking about this morning, doesn’t it? The story of Sister Agathilla, who played such a vital role in your life, when you were a struggling young girl, not wanting to go to school. She touched your life and made it so you went from being a person who didn’t want to go to school, who didn’t want to learn, to being the first person on the steps of the doors in the morning, waiting for the school to be unlocked, knowing every answer to every question because of the way that she touched your life.

You see, the kingdom of God is like a woman who scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether she sleeps or rises, the seed sprouts and grows, though she does not know how.

B: Reciting Psalm 23 to me on Wednesday night….
I thought of this a little bit on Wednesday night. For those of you who weren’t here on Wednesday night, we had our first chance to spend some time together “Beside Quiet Waters.” During that time we heard from the 23rd Psalm. Afterward, this really excited little tot came up to me and said, “Mr. Magnusson, Mr. Magnusson. I know that memory verse that you read today.” I said, “Really, you know the 23rd Psalm?” And he said, “Yeah, can I tell it to you?” So, I sat and listened as B quoted to me the 23rd Psalm. Then he went on to tell me the story about how L (his mom) works with them every morning reading and teaching them this Psalm, so that it becomes a part of their soul.

You see, the kingdom of God is like a mother who scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether she sleeps or whether she rises, the seed sprouts and grows, though she does not know how.

G and K taking the guy to the dentist.
I think a little bit about the story GM told a couple of weeks ago on Wednesday night. It was a story about a guy that she and K take to the dentist, who has a life and beliefs very different from their own. They take him there because he needs to be taken. Maybe a lot like that story in the children’s Bible that we read when we started, that wherever God is king, God’s love will be seen. So, G and K selflessly take this man to the dentist.

You see, the kingdom of God is like a couple that scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether they sleep or whether they rise, the seed sprouts and grows, though they do not know how.

C:
Or, I think about a woman named C. C is one of L’s coworkers. She’s a fabulous lady, very kind. Every time I go in and get coffee from her, she gives me a hard time, which means she must be a really good person. Just even puts up with me enough to give me a hard time is really great. But she has hit crisis lately. Her mother died, leaving a gaping hole in her life. She desperately needed to blame God, but God wanted there to be on trial, but L was, and she knows that Leanne is close to God. So, L bore the brunt of C’s pain and frustration as she dealt with those struggles. And L was able to receive those graciously and patiently. Know C finds herself in crazy financial difficulty because her husband has basically abandoned them. Instead of depositing paychecks where they should be, he is keeping them for himself. So, her son, who is a gifted ice skater, isn’t able to buy time on the ice. They are desperately struggling financially, and they discover that their A/C is on the brink.

So, L calls me one day and says, “There is a lady who needs us.” And I say, “Well, I don’t know anything about air conditioners, but I know a guy that does.” And so GR takes time out of his own schedule and goes and tries to help C. And somehow, everybody gets changed in the process. And we don’t know what’s happening, at least we don’t know how it’s happening, but somewhere we are trusting that the kingdom of God is taking root.

You see, the kingdom of God is like people who scatter seed on the ground. Night and day, whether they sleep or whether they rise, the seed sprouts and grows, though they do not know how.

Becoming a scattered people… the church has left the seed bag.
Mark’s Jesus is constantly scattering the seed of the kingdom, small pieces of himself, into the lives of others. As Jesus’ disciples, as Jesus’ learners, we are called to scatter pieces of our own lives, the seed of the kingdom, into the lives of others. And then we sleep and we rise and we watch, trusting that we are participating in the mystery of God.

You see, the kingdom of God is like a church that scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether we sleep or whether we rise, the seed sprouts and grows, even though we do not know how.

This is God’s promise… and this is the Word of the Lord.

It Takes a Community to Raise a Church - Eph 4:1-16

2009-07-08T15:30:00.000-04:00

Sermon manuscript from 28 June 2009:

As we begin this morning, let’s hear the Word of the Lord. From Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians: Read Ephesians 4:1-16

Prayer: “God, as your people, we come together today. We come to hear a word from you. As we open our minds to engage this ancient text, may it receive new life in our own lives and in our community today. May your Spirit move in us beyond anything that I might say, so that we may hear your calling in our lives, that we may be filled to the full measure as the Body of Christ, in whom we pray. Amen.”

Ephesians is one of my favorite letters. It ranks up there with some of them that Natalie have given me and… um, no. I mean it ranks up there with some of them that Paul wrote. It’s full of these majestic images. You know I love Philippians for the real earthiness of a servant Jesus, but Ephesians is very different. It’s full of majestic images, cosmic images, world-critiquing, world-shattering, world-changing images.

In sweeping and inspiring language, Paul grounds the life and the existence and the calling of the church in a breathtaking vision of what God has already done in Jesus Christ and what God continues to do in the world through the Spirit-empowered church, the Cosmic Body of Christ.

Paul knows that God’s actions in the past and God’s goals for the future guide and empower the church and help determine the way the church views her present. How she imagines living life together today.
For Paul, in Christ God’s new creation began to break into the world with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In a very real way, heaven is already coming to earth. Right now, God is unfolding his mysterious plan for the healing of creation and the reconciliation of all of humanity both to God and with one another. God is tearing down the dividing wall that separate people from one another. He is tearing down the dividing wall of hostility between Jews and Gentiles in Christ, and their unity as one cosmic, holy church is a sign to the world of the wisdom of God in all of its rich variety.

That is a beautiful vision to contemplate. In fact it’s really hard to get my head around, especially in the face of the failings of the church. But even in spite of that, it is powerful, awe-inspiring. It brings me pause.

But Paul’s cosmic images, Paul’s imagination of the church, aren’t just big dreams, but they are a challenge for a small community of Christians to imagine themselves differently.

One author describes Ephesians and what Paul is trying to do there in this way, “As Paul works to open the Ephesians to a renewed imagination, he makes claims that blur the distinctions between future and present, and [between] heaven and earth… to lift us into a time and place where we can see the world differently” S. Saunders, Int. 56, 166.

Now, I think that Paul knows if he can get this church there, if he can get them to imagine themselves differently, then he can begin to turn the key, begin to pull the lever on getting them to act differently. And so the first three chapters of Ephesians, this breathtaking vision of what God ahs done, is all just groundwork that leads up to an abrupt turn at the beginning of chapter 4.

Right on the tails of a soaring prayer and a glorious “Amen,” Paul writes, (παρακαλω ουν) “In the light of all of this, I, the prisoner of the Lord, I beg, I urge, I exhort you to walk worthy of the calling to which you have been called.”

The shocking language moves this little church from the world of the ethereal right back down to earth. It marks a powerful turn in the letter, where Paul says, “This is where the rubber meets the road; this is where all of the high thinking theology makes a difference.”

What God is doing in the cosmic church, he is now calling you to live out in your local community. As one unified body, bound together in the Spirit in the bonds of peace, grow up as a body. Mature as a body.

You see, Paul knows that it takes a whole community to raise a church.

I’ve thought about that a lot this week, especially in light of my own life, because I’m learning more and more each day that it takes a village to raise a child. I’m just not smart enough. I don’t have enough wisdom. I need a lot of help. So, I’m thankful that my daughter gets to learn from people like Peggi and people like Val and Leanne, and that she’ll get sit at Becky’s feet some day, and that she’s already being nurtured by so many of you.

And I see in very small but very real and tangible ways the difference that it’s making. When, we were down in Texas a few weeks ago, we were walking through an auditorium with some friends of ours. They were showing us a new auditorium that they built after their church building had burned down. And all of a sudden I realized that Melaina is sitting up on the stage with a Bible… open to Isaiah… turned upside down. It’s effective reading that way. Then, all of a sudden she started telling a story, which I’m pretty sure didn’t come out of Isaiah. She said, “One time Jesus was walking down the road and there was a blind man. He was blind. He was sick. He could not see. And then, Jesus spit and made mud and put it on his eyes, and he was made well. He could see.”

She’s taking her cues on life by watching all of you, because it takes a village to raise a child.

But the other thing that I’ve been learning about that is something that I thought I knew, that I thought I understood, but that I didn’t really grasp when I was growing up. I knew that my parents were changing as I was growing, but I didn’t realize how much it was a group growing process, a group maturing process. They weren’t just raising my sister and me, but they were growing as well. My parents were changing as well. We were all growing up and maturing as a family.

It takes a village to raise a child. I think along the way the village is raised as well.

I think the church is a lot like that. I think that may begin to get at what Paul is trying to say to this little church in Ephesus, or wherever the church was.

It takes a village to raise a child… and it takes a community to raise a church…

Paul wants us to understand that maturity in Christ is a comprehensive, communal experience. We have been called as a family to work together for the maturing of this body, the whole body, each of us using our gifts to equip one another and build up the body in love.

As Paul envisions it here, unity is not optional, but is demanded for working together and growing to maturity! It’s a unity that is grounded in some core, foundational beliefs about the nature of God, about who Jesus is. But it’s also grounded in some very real experiences of baptism, of the shared experience of the Spirit, and the community of faith. And grounded in our core faith and in our experience of God, we all use our gifts for the spiritual growth and maturation and strengthening of the body and empowering it for works of service, to grow to the measure of the full stature of Christ.

All too often in my experience, and maybe it’s not your own, but all to often in my experience I’ve seen people focus far more on the things that divide us than the things that unite us. When that happens we become a fragmented and broken body. But Paul here calls us to move toward mutual service and wholeness, not to the fragmentation of the body into individuals who are reconciled to God but have no horizontal relationship with one another.
Paul here encourages us to be just like him, a prisoner, but to one another, to be chained together in the bonds of peace to maintain the unity of the Spirit. The word that he uses there, the “bonds” of peace, is from the same word that Paul uses to describe himself as a prisoner of the Lord. And so, united in God and in the fundamental mystery of the faith, the church needs all of us to bring our gifts together to serve and edify and build the body of Christ and to raise this church.

It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a community to raise a church.

As Paul imagines it here, we are committed to Christ only as much as we are committed to one another. We are committed to Christ only as much as we are committed to unity and to promoting the growth and maturation of the whole body.

This is a hard calling. It’s a hard calling because it flies in the face of American individualism and the popular religious piety that says faith is really just about my relationship with God and doesn’t really connect with a church.

But this isn’t just a hard calling. This is a high calling. It’s a high calling because it takes seriously the mystery that God’s purposes for the world require us, that God’s imagination becomes reality only as we grow together into Christ in love, that we bear the privilege and responsibility of being Christ’s body, holding before the world an alternative vision of life-together in peace.

I really struggled to know whether or not say this, to use this illustration, but I’m going to step out, so if I make a mistake and cross a line, someone just talk to me about it later okay. I have had this funny image that popped out of this passage in my mind all week and I’ve tried to put it out of my mind, but I can’t get rid of it. It is the image of a “bobble-head Jesus,” where you’ve got this big head and this little, scrawny, impotent body that can’t do anything. And I’m worried that if we don’t strive to grow into Christ, the head, together that that is just what is going to happen to the church, that the only vision of Jesus that the world is going to have is of a bobbing-head that has absolutely no body and absolutely no impact in the world. Because here, as Paul describes it, Christ is the head and we are the body, so without us being unified and growing together in love Christ is just a bobbing head.

But it’s not just a hard calling; it’s not just a high calling. It’s also a holy calling. It’s a hold calling because we are reminded that none of us has arrived as individuals because we have not yet arrived as a church. Just as my parents changed and grew as I grew, so as a church we are all in the process of continuing to grow. No of us has yet arrived because the church has not yet arrived. So we must encourage one another and speak truth in love so that we can all continue to grow from childhood to maturity as one body in Christ.

It takes a community to raise a church. It takes all of us to help this church, the Lake Orion Church of Christ, grow to maturity. We all have something to offer. No, I think it’s much more than that. It’s not just that we each have something to offer. Each one of you has something that this body desperately needs. There is a big difference there. We are a priesthood of all believers. That is one of the things that we have held dear in Churches of Christ. We are a priesthood of all believers, not just some believers, not just believers who have been members for a long time, not just educated believers, not just official or titled believer, not just male believers. We are a priesthood of all believers. And each of us has something that we desperately need for this body to grow in maturity and to be raised up in faith. And we need you to play your part, so that Christ will have a body, so that the world will not just see a bobbing head.

This is a high calling, this is a holy calling, but, as Paul says, this is the calling to which we have been called.

"While It Was Still Dark..."

2009-04-13T15:04:00.006-04:00

Here are my the thoughts that I shared on Easter Sunday as we gathered around the table of the Lord and were sent into the world:

Gathered at the Table:
“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him’” (John 20:1-2).

“While it was still dark.” It’s a simple detail, not necessarily newsworthy. John has already told us it was early in the morning, but then he adds: “it was still dark.” Several days have past since Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, showing them the full extent and depths of his love. It was there, at that same table, that Jesus, the Light of the World dipped a piece of bread and handed it to Judas. Then Judas, roused by the Prince of Darkness, went out to stir up the chaotic powers of night that threaten the light. Since then, the darkness has continued to hang over the story like a shroud.

“While it was still dark.” It’s a detail that John didn’t have to include, but he makes sure to remind us of the looming darkness that still enveloped the world and the disciple’s own lives on the morning of that first day of the week when Mary went to the tomb. Her hopes had been dashed, her expectations confounded, her certainty questioned, her dreams shattered. Darkness had fallen on her life.

The darkness is disorienting. It is foreboding. The darkness of that morning doesn’t just describe the lack of the early dawn light, but opens a door for us into our own world and our own lives where the darkness that threatens God’s light, life, and love seems to be ever present. But this Easter morning as we come to this table, we confess to one another that the Word not only became flesh and lived among us, but the Word was raised from the dead! And we have seen his glory! The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it!!!

Sent into the World:
“For whom are you looking?” (John 20:15). It is a question that is not new to us. It has circled around John since the first chapter, when those two disciples came from John the Baptist to follow Jesus. Jesus asked them, “For what are you looking?” Not even sure themselves, they replied, “We want to see where you are staying.” Jesus simply replies, “Come and see.” With those three words the consummate teacher invites them on a journey of discovery. Throughout John’s gospel, we’ve been struggling to encounter Jesus, to know and understand the elusive Word made flesh. Like those first disciples, we have develop our own our preconceptions and our own expectations of this Jesus.

Mary wandered to the garden that morning with those expectations shattered, with her preconceptions of Jesus crucified. She came to the garden looking for a dead body in a tomb. But here, from the disorienting experience of Jesus crucifixion, Mary hears Jesus’ reorienting, life giving word, “Mary.” With that word her world changed.

Jesus then says to her, “Go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ Mary went out proclaiming to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord;’ and she told him that he had said these things to her” (John 20:17b-18).

After her reorienting, transforming encounter with the risen Word, Mary is then commissioned, sent by Jesus to be a preacher (20:17), to declare what she has experienced. She is empowered by Jesus to proclaim Gospel to the disciples.

Maybe this Easter season our preconceptions of Jesus needed to be crucified our expectations of Jesus shattered, so that we might come face to face with the Living Word. Just like Mary, we have encountered a risen Lord today. And just like Mary, God sends us. This morning we have encountered the resurrected Jesus again. We must reaffirm and recommit to our baptismal covenant, saying yes again to the resurrected Lord who sends us to proclaim the one whom we have found (20:15), or better, the one who has found us!

This morning, let this prayer send us out to bear witness to the resurrected one:
Love divine, in raising Christ to new life you opened the path of salvation to all peoples. Send us out, with the joy of Mary Magdalene, to proclaim that we have seen the Lord, so that all the world may celebrate with you the banquet of your peace. Amen.

Have "This" Mind in You: Consumptive Culture and Our Children

2009-03-31T14:18:00.004-04:00

If you have ever watched Saturday morning cartoons/shows with your children, you have experienced first hand the attempt to train and indoctrinate our children in the ways of consumptive culture. The gospel of consumerism is a deceptive one that can often seem benign, but that cultivates in our children (and us) a particular way of understanding life, including how we view ourselves and our relationships to others, the world, and God. It calls us to be its disciple, to develop habits and a pattern of life shaped by its story, driving toward its eschatology. The story proclaimed by this particular gospel steals our imaginations and erodes our moral decision making capacities in profound ways. Just remember back a few years ago when the word that was supposed to be the most profound reassurance of hope born out the September 11 disaster was "America is now open for business." Our imaginations have been commandeered by a the need and desire to consume. (For a wonderful look at some of the issues here and their impact on our lives, consider Cavanaugh's Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire.)

Recently, my wife discovered a wonderful initiative called the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. It is a national coalition of everyone from professionals to parents, activists to authors, that is housed at the Judge Baker Children's Center at Harvard. The CCFC webpage is full of wonderful ideas on how to think about and counter the impact of consumptive culture on our children, which can also serve to spark our imaginations on how it might be impacting us as well. I hope that you will consider glancing at it.

Here is the CCFC mission statement:

CCFC’s mission is to reclaim childhood from corporate marketers. A marketing-driven media culture sells children on behaviors and values driven by the need to promote profit rather than the public good. The commercialization of childhood is the link between many of the most serious problems facing children, and society, today. Childhood obesity, eating disorders, youth violence, sexualization, family stress, underage alcohol and tobacco use, rampant materialism, and the erosion of children’s creative play, are all exacerbated by advertising and marketing. When children adopt the values that dominate commercial culture—dependence on the things we buy for life satisfaction, a “me first” attitude, conformity, impulse buying, and unthinking brand loyalty—the health of democracy and sustainability of our planet are threatened. CCFC works for the rights of children to grow up—and the freedom for parents to raise them—without being undermined by commercial interests.

*I do realize that there are a lot of thoughts here that are not fleshed out. My intent in this post is not so much to examine the sources of the problem or to show all of the ways the gospel of consumerism is in a contest with the narrative we claim as our own as Christians. It is, rather, simply to shine a light on the problem to encourage thinking on the topic and to offer some creative food for thought from the CCFC.

Baby steps

2009-03-25T15:09:00.002-04:00

Our society tends to crave instant results. Just look at major college and professional sports programs, corporate projections and executive plans, or even television show development and longevity decisions. Let me see the results now or we'll trade you to another team, destroy your contract, send you to the bench, fire you, or pull the plug on your show. Over the past week I've been thinking a lot about baby steps.

I have especially been thinking about them in the world of the ministry of reconciliation. There is something vital about reconciliation in the kingdom of God. If you're not sure about that, just read 2 Corinthians, Paul's impassioned plea to the community in Corinth to rethink their relationship to him vis a vis God, not the "super apostles" (esp focus on chs. 4-5).

Baby steps in the ministry of reconciliation are vital. They are not easy, because we are nurtured to crave the quick fix. Yet, baby steps are all that most of us have. They are never black and white, never definitive. We have to struggle with those close to us to try to discern what to do, how to live and act in a way that scatters seeds of reconciliation in hope, trusting that the Spirit of God will move in ways far beyond our limited ability, beyond our mere baby steps, to bring about healing, hope, new creation, yes, reconciliation.

God, give us the courage to take baby steps, and do things beyond our imagination when we take those steps in faith.

“As You Have Sent Me into the World…”

2009-03-22T07:57:00.001-04:00

The blazing orange poster board with green letters captured my eyes. The placement was perfect. Nothing haphazard. Nothing left to chance. (The empty seats around this fan made that perfectly clear.) The sign’s designer and creator had strategically taken his seat behind the basket at the far end of the court, just enough to the left of the backboard that his bold message was unimpeded by anything, visible to anyone craving a little March Madness. The bold green on the orange canvas read: “John 3:16.”
It’s not an unusual thing to see at a sporting event, but it got me thinking this week. I do not doubt the sincerity of this young man’s attempt to profess his faith, but I wonder about the effectiveness. In a very real way, I think it is symptomatic of a problem, a crisis that we face in the church. The 8 characters painted with such pious care on the sign were completely disconnected from anything that might make sense of them. They were words with a context. And without a context, words always fall short of their target.
In the ethereal prologue to the Fourth Gospel, we come face to face with the Word. The language takes a powerful turn at verse 14: “The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory….” Think for a minute about the implications of that confession. The Word made flesh stepped into first century Palestine and revealed God in a new and profound way (1:18). God sent the Word into the world to incarnate God’s love in a specific time and place, in a particular context (“lived among us, and we have seen”).
Throughout his account of the life and ministry of Jesus, John continues to reflect on Jesus, to wrestle with the context of his own day to discern and discover how the story of Jesus intersects and speaks into the experience of his church and his world. He invites the Word to become flesh again in his own day and time for a people who had not seen the Word with their own eyes, had not looked at it and touched with their hands (cf. 1 John 1:1). The universal message of God’s love (John 3:16) had to become a Word made flesh among them.
We are here now. We are not in the waning days of the first century, as John was when he put flesh on Jesus’ story for his church. We are called to become the Word made flesh for the world in our own time, to dwell here in our world. We can dwell in no other time, no bygone era. We are called and sent by Jesus to incarnate the God’s love in our world today, in our context (John 17:18; 20:21). The problem with holding up blazing orange signs with green letters is that the message is not recognizable to our world. There is no flesh and blood in them. As those sent by Jesus, we are called to know where we are, to engage and dialogue with our world. We need to be disciples who have a newspaper in one hand and a Bible in the other, so that we can know our context and discover God’s word for our day and time, just as John struggled to understand God’s word for his community.
This is a difficult but essential calling if we are to be the disciples of the Word who became flesh. But we are not without hope! In the same breath as he sends his disciples into the world, Jesus gives them the gift of the Spirit (20:21-22). As we step faithfully into our world to give the Word flesh again, we trust that God gives us all of the resources we need to be sent.
(See the comments at this post for an intriguing discussion on this topic.)

Technological Promise and Moral Reflection

2009-03-13T08:05:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I stumbled across a piece at NPR called "'Sexting': A Disturbing New Teen Trend?"

I think that this is an important, though disconcerting, piece about the impact that technological change and development has on our society. N and I have had an ongoing dinner conversation about the boons and banes of technology with a couple of wonderful friends of ours. Last night, as we were talking about this article and reflecting on a previous conversation we'd had about the strange reality of Facebook, we began to think some about a very important question: How is our technological advancement outpacing our ability for moral reflection? Do we place so much pride in technological development that we cannot proactively think through the ethical implications of the very things that we create? (Now, that said, I do understand that most moral reasoning develops by hindsight reflection on things that have happened, but I don't think that is necessarily the best approach to moral reasoning and development.)

Here is one of the problems that I see, when our technology so outpaces our thinking and reasoning regarding its moral and ethical possibilities and pitfalls, we begin to allow the technology to become a, if not the, major shaping factor in our lives. In my opinion, this is an especially big danger for those of us who have grown up in particular Christian traditions that have not instilled in us the ability to reason theologically about morality and everyday life, but have instead based moral righteousness on two or three big pet ethical issues (primarily substance abuse and things that happen below the waistline).

As my friend J said last night, we are at a time where certain things can happen that were never possible before. All respect to Qoheleth, but J is right. These are new things under the sun. But that does not mean that the skills necessary to navigate these waters are completely new. Rather, we need to learn to move beyond a "pattern" reading Scripture, at least in the way "pattern" has been idolized in my particular Christian tradition, to what Stephen Fowl calls an analogical ethic based on deep reflection of our experience in light of the story of Jesus. This would move us beyond the false assumption that there is a simple one-to-one, black-and-white correspondence between Scripture and our own experience to the need for deep and ongoing reflection about the things we are engaging.

Now, fighting my inner temptation to write too much more, I simply ask these questions:

What does it mean to be morally virtuous in our technological age?
How is our technology shaping the ways we live and understand ourselves and others?
What avenues do you have in your congregations, small groups, of among your friends for deep reflection on what it means to be human, to live in community, and to imagine a fully embodied morality?
How can we begin to empower people in our communities of faith with skills needed for deep moral reflection?

The Coming Evangelical Collapse

2009-03-12T10:02:00.005-04:00

I was blessed yesterday when one of my best friends pointed me toward an interesting piece. In a thought provoking, though slightly over-the-top, article in the Christian Science Monitor, Michael Spencer suggests that an "anti-Christian chapter in Western history is about to begin." The article is interesting in thinking about the relationship between church and culture and how to imagine what it means to be the people of God in a changing world.

Here are some of my initial, very quick and not fully developed responses to Spencer's piece and some questions my friend asked regarding its implications:

That was the sentence that I was just captured by as well. ("The integrity of the church as a countercultural movement with a message of 'empire subversion' will increasingly replace a message of cultural and political entitlement.") The grammar of imperial subversion, the rhetoric of kingdom of God is all over Scripture. (To proclaim that Jesus is "lord and Messiah/Christ" is to say firmly and boldly that Caesar is not.) This is a real problem for a church system that tries to cling to the imperial system. It has been since the Constantinian shift. This has been especially difficult in American society, when the attempt of "evangelical faith" to have a place at the table has been to align itself closely with a particular political ideology. (This is not a value statement or an attempt to say whether or not it chose the correct political side. To align and partner fully with either the right or the left, IMHO, is poor form.)

I think that the continuing marginalization of the church could be a wonderful impetus for it to regain its prophetic voice and, as the missional church folks like to say, "to cultivate what is necessary because we have left what was familiar for an uncertain and unknown future with God." Like the author here, I think that this is not a time about which to fret, clinging to that which needs to pass, but for hopeful reimagination of what God might be doing here. Everything that God's people need for God's future is among the people of God. We just have to be humble and daring enough to embrace it.

In an article/chapter I was reading yesterday, the author talked about moving from the American church culture of sham worship, worship based on a consumer mindset where God and the experience are manipulated to meet consumer demand (albeit Christian consumer demand!), to dangerous worship where we are forced to encounter God on God's terms to become formed and shaped to learn God's language and begin to think about the world according to the story of God (celebration) rather than God according to the story of the world (consumerist consumption). It was a powerful article that hits some of the challenges here.

I think that one of the questions that Jeff asked is very important: "What weakness do we face if we turn out to have a weak theology (knowledge of God) but a strong ecclesiology (knowledge of church)?" I think that a strong ecclesiology must be rooted in a strong and healthy theology. I think that has been one of the inherent weaknesses of the Churches of Christ. We have a decent ecclesiology (though far too individualistic, IMHO), but it is a house built on a weak foundation, a weak understanding of the Triune God. In light of this, many Churches of Christ, and those who have been shaped and formed on this anemic vision of God, have few resources with which to address the major things facing us in the midst of this shift. An important dialogue between orthodoxy (right thinking) and orthopraxis (right acting) must take place in our church communities, engaging our culture, our experience, and Scripture, in order for us to survive this.

Alright, I have much to do and need to get back to it, but am thankful for this quick, though wonderful little chance to think about this stuff with y'all. Sorry for my nonsensical ramblings above. Feel free to hit delete at this point, if you hadn't already long before making it here!

I followed this response up with this thought that came to me while driving to lunch....

I think that an important reason for the evangelical movement to start with theological reflection here is that far too often the evangelical movement has thought of itself as "god" (at least among the various Christian streams). Why is this theological reflection then important? Because the way you think about God matters in how you imagine yourself. If the evangelical movement continues to grope after power and lord it over others in the way that "the lords of the gentiles do", then they are working against the rich christian tradition of a crucified God/messiah. The question for the evangelical movement in America is whether or not they will willingly choose to walk the way of the cross, to choose the path of "foolishness", trusting that the God of resurrection will bring something beautiful and new out of it. Or will they choose to continue to exploit power according to the world's standards and fight for supremacy and primacy in the palace. So, theological reflection has the potential to guide the choices and decisions here, especially if a rich theology of God as Creator can help replace fear, which leads to groping for power, with hope and trust in the "God who raised Jesus from the dead."

There is a reason that Christianity has been at its best when its a religion of the marginalized and that its been at its worst when it is a tool of those with power.

Again, these are just initial reactions to the piece that are, admittedly, not well developed. What are your thoughts about Spencer's article as it relates to your experience of the church and society? What do you think about my initial reactions?

Unity in Diversity

2009-03-12T09:58:00.004-04:00

“Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me…. The Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you” (John 14:11, 26).

God has called us to unity, to share a deep, sacrificial love with all who “abide” in God (John 17: 21-23; 13:34-35). This unity in love is a high calling, a true witness to the world of the creative power and love of God. In my lifetime, though, I have noticed, as you likely have, that we seem to struggle to understand the difference between unity and uniformity. Christians are especially prone to separate ourselves from others based on our differences and preferences, rather than be drawn together with one another. Yet, the church is designed to be the reflection and image of God on earth. And what is God? As we see in the passages from John above, God is inherently three-in-one, a unified diversity. The church must find a way to reflect the God it worships, to live together as a 'mosaic' of humanity that is unified in the midst of its diversity (racially, ethnically, politically, theologically, etc.).

One of the most challenging books I’ve read on this subject is Mark Cunningham’s These Three Are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology. In it he suggests that the church must reflect the unity we see in the Trinity. He uses three wonderful terms to describe this little dance between Father, Son, and Spirit that help us reflect on unity in the Body of Christ: participation, particularity, and polyphony. Participation refers to the mutual, intimate interaction between people that allows us both to know and to be known by those in the church. That kind of knowing brings us together as one body, united in our differences. Particularity highlights the fact that we are all different, but we only really know and appreciate our own identity, as well as that of others, when we stand next to and with other people. True unity highlights our differences, our particularity, just as the characteristics and beauty of an individual piece of colored glass is made clearer when it is placed next to other pieces of varying colors in a mosaic. Finally, polyphonic is a musical term that refers to the bringing together of diverse sounds into one symphonic piece. (Some of you may know the term from the indie musical troop The Polyphonic Spree, which brings together a wide range of unique vocal and instrumental sounds to create some amazing music.) The church unites in our uniqueness and differences so that God, the Master Conductor, can weave us into a beautiful symphony of his love in the world.

My mind was captured by this beautiful picture of our unity in diversity this morning as I was shifting the chairs slightly, so that we can see one another a little more clearly as we worship and break bread together. Today, as we are called together by the Father, as we gather around Table to receive the hospitality of Christ, as we center ourselves in the Word, and as we are drawn together by the power of the Spirit who abides with us, may we strive for true unity in the midst of diversity. And may that unity in love be a living witness of God to the world (John 17:21).

Seeking Wholeness in Life

2009-02-23T09:56:00.002-05:00

We live in a society that makes it far too easy to buy into the temptation of living a divided life. The internet welcomes an encourages us to become different people online, creating a "second life," a disembodied existence that may bear little, if any, resemblance to the embodied life we live each day, filled with incongruous posts, photos, comments, and snarky remarks that belie the story we claim to live in our "real" lives. Our churches too often encourage us to leave the realities of life kindly at the door, tucking our pains, frustrations, and despair, not to mention our distressing doubts about God, into our coats with our winter hats and gloves. "Hang them in the coat closet before entering the sanctuary, please. You won't really need those in here. Those are private things, not public."

Today, I was encouraged and challenged by this little quote from Henri Nouwen on the ways in which the most personal things are actually the most universal. Like most of Nouwen's material, the beauty of a short simple phrase is only reinforced when you stop and spent time reflecting on the deep and rich implications of what he's suggesting. There are a lot of posibilities here for growth, for healing, and for transformation of individuals, communities, and the world.

We like to make a distinction between our private and public lives and say, "Whatever I do in my private life is nobody else's business." But anyone trying to live a spiritual life will soon discover that the most personal is the most universal, the most hidden is the most public, and the most solitary is the most communal. What we live in the most intimate places of our beings is not just for us but for all people. That is why our inner lives are lives for others. That is why our solitude is a gift to our community, and that is why our most secret thoughts affect our common life.

Jesus says, "No one lights a lamp to put it under a tub; they put it on the lamp-stand where it shines for everyone in the house" (Matthew 5:14-15). The most inner light is a light for the world. Let's not have "double lives"; let us allow what we live in private to be known in public.

Proverbial Wisdom...

2009-02-17T09:31:00.002-05:00

"I take pleasure in three things, and they are beautiful in the sight of God and of mortals:
agreement among brothers and sisters,
friendship among neighbors,
and a wife and a husband who live in harmony.

I hate three kinds of people,
and I loathe their manner of life:
a pauper who boasts, a rich person who lies,
and an old fool who commits adultery."

Sirach 25:1-2

The Meal that Makes Us Family and Friends

2009-02-15T05:21:00.009-05:00

This morning before leaving the house, I set out bread and wine, trying to get our table ready for our small group to gather after worship. Against my inner prodding, I didn't take the time to reset the table with placemats and cloth napkins. I felt alright about it at the time. It's early, and I wanted to have some time to pray in silence this morning before going to a meeting with my leadership and finalizing some things for this morning's class. After reading this quote from Nouwen, I think I made the wrong decision.

We all need to eat and drink to stay alive. But having a meal is more than eating and drinking. It is celebrating the gifts of life we share. A meal together is one of the most intimate and sacred human events. Around the table we become vulnerable, filling one another's plates and cups and encouraging one another to eat and drink. Much more happens at a meal than satisfying hunger and quenching thirst. Around the table we become family, friends, community, yes, a body.

That is why it is so important to "set" the table. Flowers, candles, colorful napkins all help us to say to one another, "This is a very special time for us, let's enjoy it!"

I'm also thinking about the Eucharistic table, the table of the Lord. In a little while I will gather with a group of people for worship, which, against our Protestant focus on the sermon, is centered and grounded at Table. This morning, as every Sunday, we will be welcomed to the Table of the Lord, to come and feast from the overflowing abundance of God's creative goodness and life-giving hospitality.

Yet, the table that sits front and center in our midst is cold and sterile. The focus is not bread and wine, but metal trays that conceal the sacred, rather than drawing us into the welcome of God. The small, lifeless crackers and the plastic, individual shots of juice seem to turn us inward, disconnecting us from one another more than drawing us more fully into a shared life, a body. In many ways, our table changes Nouwen's final line to something a bit different. The stacked trays do remind us that this is a special time, but I'm not sure that they invite us to "enjoy it!"

So, I'm struck this morning by the messages that are at times latent and others explicit in our our worship. As we gather at the table of the Lord this morning, are we becoming friends of God? Around the table are we becoming family, friends, community, a body with one another? How is our experience shaping our life together with the Triune God and with one another?

Hospitality is a lively, courageous, and convivial way of living that challenges our compulsion either to turn away or to turn inward and disconnect ourselves from others. Hospitality is not optional to a well-balanced and health life. It meets the most basic need of the human being to be known and to know others (Homan and Pratt, Radical Hospitality, 9).

Love: Angel Mission

2009-02-12T09:48:00.000-05:00

Got any gift ideas for Valentine's Day? We do. from Angel Mission on Vimeo.

A Rabbit, a Frog, and a Lesson on Hospitality

2009-02-04T10:25:00.011-05:00

A new genre has been added to my reading repertoire of late: children's books. There are few things that I love more than reading books. Add a cute little daughter saying "Let's read a different book now, daddy," and I melt. The dense theology texts go back in the backpack, and we grab another Theodore Geisel or Stan and Jan Berenstain special.

As a family, we spend far too much time at the Lake Orion library and bring home crates of books at a time. One of the books that is on our frequent check out list is Sandy Asher's Too Many Frogs. The book is fun, creative, aesthetically wonderful (illustrations by Keith Graves), and one of the most accessible lessons in the Christian tradition of hospitality that I've seen.

It begins with a simple declaration of Rabbit’s quiet, calm, uninterrupted life:

"Rabbit lived by himself in the hollow of an old tree.
He cooked for himself.
He tied up after himself.
And at the end of each and every day, he read himself a story.
It was a simple way of life - no fuss, no clutter. And Rabbit liked it."

Then, just as he's sliding back into his recliner to read a new story, Rabbit hears a "knock-knockety-knocking" at his door. With that knock, Rabbit's tidy, “no fuss, no clutter” world is intruded by Froggie. The rest of the story is a walk through Rabbit's struggle to learn to live with this new intrusion by the other, to find a new way of welcome and of grace, especially when it shatters his expectations and preferences of how his evenings might go. After much inner turmoil and outer struggle, Rabbit realizes that Froggie’s intrusion is an offer of grace, a chance for Rabbit to discover "a different way of life. And Rabbit liked it."

The story reminds me of the reality of hospitality as a Christian discipline. It is an offer of grace that is full of intrusion. It has little to do with the Southern Living or Martha Stewart kinds of plans and preparations. These guests are often not invited, stumbling into our no fuss, no clutter lives and wreaking havoc. It has to do with an openness of life, one that struggles to allow the grace of welcome to tip the scales, rather than mistrust and fear. It is about discovering that our thoughts and perspectives are provisional and that the other just might have something to offer. This kind of hospitality is never easy, but, if we take Scripture seriously, when we open our lives and welcome the intrusion of strangers and guests, we might come to discover that it's been God's hand "knock-knockety-knocking" at door.

I hope that N and I can show radical hospitality and truly welcome the gift of strangers, expecting to encounter the presence of God in them. Most importantly, I hope and I pray that N and I model for MJ the hospitality of God that is at the heart of this little book. (Hmm... reminds me of the importance of a story-formed morality, but that's gonna have to wait for another day.)

Language Audit

2009-01-15T07:02:00.006-05:00

It's been a long time since I've posted anything here. It's been a storm of business, lack of creativity, and, well, blog-laziness on my part. I've got a long list of posts I want and hope to write, but I'm not sure what will come of it.

Two weeks ago MJ and I had a week of daddy-daughter time. Natalie was in Philadelphia for a short course for her graduate program, which meant that MJ got to spend her mornings with me at the office and I worked from home in the afternoons while she was napping. We had a wonderful week together, though we both missed mommy!

On the Wednesday night of that week, I was reminded of the importance of our language and it's shaping power over our lives. MJ and I braved the weather and headed to the LOCC building for a time of reading Scripture as a community of faith. As I was fumbling around to unlock the door, she looked up at me and said, "This is my church house! I want to go to my church house." Nothing like a little lesson on ecclesiology from your two-year old daughter! Simple. Powerful. Profound.

I have spent a lot of time reflecting on that statement over the past week and a half. Somewhere along the way MJ has made a connection that church is far more than just the building, that the location on 1080 Hemingway Road is just simply a “church house.” When we gather here as a body, it is a sacred place, but that is not because the building is sacred. This space becomes holy because we, the holy people of God, gather together in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit; and when we gather, God promises to be present with us.

That night MJ reminded me of the power of how we say things. David Keller and I frequently talk about the importance of the language we use, how we choose to say things. My good friend Randy Harris says it this way: “Language is the only game in town.” Our language both reveals what we believe and also shapes how we think. Think about a very common phrase that many of us use regularly: “Let’s go to church.” Over time, that phrase has a powerful impact on what we think about God, about discipleship, and about the nature of the church. “God” becomes localized to a place and a time, rather than the God of the incarnation who is present and revealed in every moment of life. “Church” becomes a place or an event that happens once or twice a week, rather than the living people of God who are called to live into their baptism each and every day. Our focus becomes “getting church right” rather than thinking about how we are being transformed every moment of the day to be people who share and reveal Christ’s character. It’s important to audit our language periodically and think about how it shapes the things we believe and how we live.

Language really makes a difference... and on her own my little girl got her language right. She taught me an important lesson. I was both humbled and proud.

Life Together in Community, parts 3-5

2008-08-18T10:57:00.002-04:00

Well, I just received a comment from my disgruntled father, er, um, I mean an inquisitive reader, who asked about the remaining installments of this thread. I apologize for the delay in posting them, but have been out of the office and on the road and trying to catch up when I'm not. I've had these done for a while for our bulletin at LOCC, but forgot to post them here. I apologize!

So, without further adieu...

Life Together, part 3: A “Storytelling” Community, cont…

In the last installment of this short series, we suggested that we are the actors on the stage, living out God’s drama, which takes its most concrete shape in the self-emptying story of Jesus (Phil 2:5-11). Empowered by the Spirit, it is the task of the church to keep God’s drama alive, to keep the play moving until God acts decisively to finish the drama at the return of Christ. We asked “How can we continue this important practice of helping each other narrate our stories according to the pattern of Jesus today? How can we help fit one another’s lives into God’s salvation drama?” I suggested three things: dwelling in Scripture (which we considered in part 2), imitation of others, and attentive participation in worship. Today we continue this discussion by thinking about the way that the imitation of others can empower us to become “storytelling” friends in Christ.

As we continue to consider Paul’s letter to the Philippian Christians, we hear something that might be rather striking to our modern ears. Paul admonishes the church to “join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example that you have in us” (3:17). What if we were to receive this letter today? How would we respond? I imagine that to most of us would think this call to “imitate me” sounded like arrogant self-promotion. For Paul, however, the recognition and imitation of exemplars is a crucial element in the life of discipleship.

Like any profession, trade, or skill, successfully living the Christian life requires imitating or apprenticing under others. This begins with the imitation of Christ, but we also need others, those who have already acquired and display the skills, disciplines, and habits of thinking, feeling, and acting that we see exemplified in the life of Jesus. We can only hope to progress and advance as we submit ourselves to the example of those who are more advanced in embodying the story of Jesus. For Paul, it is not the call to “imitate me” that is arrogant, but the insistence of those “so formed by the ethos of individualism that they think they can walk the path of discipleship without observing, learning from, and imitating those already farther down that path” (Fowl, 167).

We begin to grasp a better picture of what Paul is encouraging this church to practice if you read through Philippians 2 and 3. After setting out the story of Jesus as his master narrative in 2:6-11, Paul begins to give examples of others who are living out Jesus’ story as their own: Timothy (2:19-24); Epaphroditus (25-30); and Paul himself (3:4b-21). As you read through each account, you can see Paul shaping the stories to look very similar to Jesus’ story. As you read them, can you hear the echoes of 2:6-11? Somehow in our attempt to recover the life of the early church we’ve lost the important practice of telling our stories as a part of God’s story of salvation. By telling the stories of and modeling our lives after the living exemplars in our midst, we can learn to fit all of our lives into God’s story. As we seek to recover this practice today, how can we find living exemplars in our communities and tell their stories both to give God glory and to allow their faithfulness to serve as an example for others to imitate? How can we create space in our worship gatherings, our small groups, and our fellowship and common life to tell our stories and learn to imitate one another as we imitate Christ?

Next week we’ll finish up by thinking about the way attentive participation in worship can empower us to become “storytelling” friends in Christ, as well as the necessity of accountability in Christian friendships and community.

Life Together, part 4: A “Storytelling” Community, cont…

In the last installment of this short series, we suggested that we are Spirit empowered actors living out God’s drama, which takes its most concrete shape in the self-emptying story of Jesus (Phil 2:5-11). Empowered by the Spirit, it is the task of the church to keep God’s drama alive. I suggested three ways we can help each other narrate our stories according to the pattern of Jesus: dwelling in Scripture, imitation of others, and attentive participation in worship.

Today we finish this discussion by thinking about the way our attentive participation in worship empowers us to become “storytelling” friends in Christ. At their heart, the rituals and habits of worship tell God’s story and form the foundation for grounding our lives in faith. In worship we gather to hear the story of God proclaimed through the public reading of Scripture, through the preached Word, through testimony and song. This proclamation is experienced most significantly in the rituals of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are story telling at their most powerful. On the one hand, they tell a compressed and dramatic account of God’s story of the life and death of Jesus, reminding us of the drama we’ve accepted and made our own. But, as we celebrate them together, they become far more than just storytelling rituals; they are invitations to us from God and from one another to live out the story in our own lives today. This is why both baptism and the Lord’s Supper are public acts, not private transactions. As we are plunged into the baptismal waters and as we take and pass the body and blood of Christ, we both enact the story, participating in its movement, and we commit to the story, choosing to make it our way of life in the world. As we share the communion together weekly we recommit to God and to one another to live into the story we have claimed as our own, to live the baptized life. By carefully attending to and participating in these rituals of worship, we reaffirm God’s story and recommit to God and recovenant with one another to make it our own way of living in the world.

Life Together, part 5: A Community of Accountability

In American society we are trained and schooled in the habits of individualism. While we choose to be connected to others, we rarely, if ever, invite others to hold us accountable to any standard of living. Yet, as we see in Philippians, Paul believes that our shared connection and unity in Christ demands an extraordinary level of accountability. More boldly, Paul believes that the unity or communion of believers is intimately tied to our communion with God, to our salvation.

How is this the case? Paul and the Philippians can make demands on each other’s lives because he and they are in Christ. “Their common participation in the body of Christ sets them on a shared journey in which they can and must engage each other as fellow pilgrims, offering help when needed, making demands when called for, exhorting and praying for each other as they move into ever deeper communion with God” (Fowl 87).

Think about that for a while, what would it mean for us to become a counter cultural community that takes our connection in Christ seriously? How might we, through our shared accountability to one another, be challenged and inspired to grow more into the image of Christ? How might we be able to tell our stories as a part of God’s drama of salvation better if we shared more intimacy and accountability in our relationships?

Life Together, part 2: A “Storytelling” Community*

2008-07-25T11:29:00.003-04:00

“More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” Phil 3:8

Last week we began to explore Paul’s vision of life together as a community of friends through his letter to the Philippian Christians. We were reminded that the root of our unity and common life is God’s story, which takes its most concrete shape in the story of Jesus’ self-emptying, self-giving, status-renouncing love (Phil 2:6-11). As we read Philippians, we quickly discover that for Paul the church provides a context for one of the basic and foundational practices of Christian friendship: the practice of telling our own stories as a part of the ongoing story of what God is doing in the world. In an American context where friendship is largely about whom I like and what friendships do for me, this probably seems like a fairly strange idea. But for Paul, a major part of Christian friendship is helping one another to see and to situate our lives in the story of what God is doing in the world.

The Philippian Christians see Paul do this several times in his letter. Paul’s encounter with the risen Jesus on the Damascus Road changed the way he understood God’s saving purposes and his own story (2 Cor 5:16-17). Because of this encounter, he can reimagine his past, present, and future and retell his own story from the perspective of being in Christ. He does this in two particular passages in Philippians, 1:12-26 and 3:4-21. As you read these passages, you see that Paul is able to look at his own story and see in it a sharing in the story of Jesus, a reflection of the Christ hymn of 2:6-11. Likewise, Paul is able to retell the stories of his friends Timothy (2:19-24) and Epaphroditus (2:25-30) as reflections of God’s salvation story. Like Christ, they are concerned for the Philippians’ welfare, not their own; they take great risks for the sake of others; they look after the interests of others. Their lives are episodes in the larger drama of God’s purposes for creation.

How can we continue this important practice of helping each other narrate our stories according to the pattern of Jesus today? How can we help fit one another’s lives into God’s salvation drama? I want to suggest three things: dwelling in Scripture, imitation of others, and attentive participation in worship. First, it will require dwelling in Scripture, a long and sustained attention to the Word. Weaving our stories into God’s story demands that we know the drama of God’s saving work in creation. We must, therefore, be committed to learning the various movements of the biblical story together, reading it, meditating upon it, and dwelling in it together.

NT Wright has a helpful way to think about Scripture. Imagine the divine story of Scripture as an unfinished, five-act play: I - creation, II - the break in relationship between God and creation, III - the story of Israel, IV - the story of Jesus, V - the story of the church and God’s new creation, which continues until the climactic finale of the return of Christ. We find ourselves living in the middle of Act V, a part of the unfinished story of the church. We are the actors on the stage, living out God’s drama. We must know the beginning of the story to know how to act out our parts today. We take our cues on how to live from those actors who have gone before us, most perfectly seen in the self-emptying life and death of Jesus. Empowered by the Spirit, it is the task of the church to keep the drama alive, to keep the play moving until God acts decisively to finish the drama at the return of Christ. Empowering one another to live out this story is our highest calling as friends in Christ.

Next week we’ll continue this discussion by thinking about the ways that the imitation of others and attentive participation in worship can empower us to become “storytelling” friends in Christ. In two weeks we’ll finish up by thinking about the necessity of accountability in Christian friendships and community.

* I owe a great debt to Stephen Fowl's insightful and thought-provoking theological commentary on Philippians for the thoughts on friendship in Christ in this series. His work on Christian community and the reading of Scripture is also an incredibly helpful and challenging resource for contemporary communities of faith.

Life Together: A Community “in Christ”

2008-07-15T16:19:00.000-04:00

“Entering into friendships in Christ… is not simply an added benefit of the Christian life; it is constitutive of the Christian life.” – Stephen Fowl

Throughout this week I’ve continued to reflect on the nature of Christian community and friendship. Community is at the heart of Christian life. In fact, Fowl is right when he suggests that “entering into friendships in Christ… is constitutive of Christian life.” There is no such thing as private, individual faith, for we are all bound together in Christ Jesus by connections and bonds that are forged in our baptism. And these are not voluntary bonds; we do not get to choose our brothers and sisters in Christ. Through our baptism we are drawn by God into a deep communion with God and with all of those who are in Christ. As Rowan Williams puts it, “the event of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection… has created a different sort of human community; professing commitment to Jesus as Lord connects us not only to Jesus but to one another in a new way.” We don’t choose one another; Christ chooses us!

The Christian life cannot be lived alone. We have all been caught up together into the larger drama of God’s ongoing work and dealings in the world. We can see this in Paul’s letter to the Philippian Christians, where Paul’s encouragement assumes and presupposes a community of people (Phil 2:1-5). The question, then, is “What does it mean to live together as an authentically Christian community?”

Paul’s answer begins with having “the same mind” (2:2, 5). This does not mean that we must think the same things or have identical doctrine before we can live together in community. This idea actually flies in the face of what Paul is trying to say. We have already been brought together in Christ, so by suggesting that we have the “same mind,” the “mind of Christ,” Paul is saying that we must share in Christ’s approach to life, his way of thinking about living. The power of what Paul is suggesting is precisely a function of its daring improbability. As Richard Hays would say, Paul is “inviting the readers to see their own lives as corresponding to the gracious action of the Lord whom they acclaim in their worship.”

At the root of our unity and common life, then, is God’s story, which takes its most concrete shape in the story of Jesus’ self-emptying, self-giving, status-renouncing love (Phil 2:6-11). This is the “mind of Christ.” These are the dispositions that must form and direct our friendships with each other. Paul exhorts the Christian community in Philippi to have this mind, to live cruciform lives, shaped by the story of Christ who chose the way of the cross. Paul encourages them to think, feel, and act according to the cross-shaped way of Jesus.

Over the next two weeks, I want to look at a two of the many facets of Paul’s understanding of Christian community as a life together in Christ from Philippians: accountability and story-telling.

A few reflections after five years

2008-05-30T16:16:00.002-04:00

In the presence of God, our family and our friends, I promise you my life and my love. As our journeys become one, I bring you all that I have, all of my hopes and all of my dreams, all of my strengths and all of my weaknesses. I vow to love you as Christ loves his church. I promise to stand by you always, to share with you in times of joy and triumph, and to support you in times of sorrow and pain. As we travel the roads of life together, I will do my best to lead us into a deeper union with God. Today, I give myself to you without hesitation. I give you all that I have, I give you all that I am, for as long as we both shall live.

Five years ago tomorrow, I made this covenant to Natalie. I keep a copy of it in my Bible and try to read it frequently. The reason is that I need to be reminded of the promise which I am daily trying to live into, the covenant that I must reaffirm each day.

As Christians we believe that marriage is a microcosm of discipleship, each day we recommit ourselves to walking the way of Jesus in the world. Despite what some might say, marriage is likely the most challenging and difficult of our baptismal callings. Our covenant to our spouses is a crucible of transformation that God uses to make us holy. More than any other relationship or set of relationships, marriage is the place where we learn to live the baptized life.

In marriage several worlds continually collide with one another. Both persons bring their own dreams and hopes about the future, the little stories that run through their minds about how things will be in life. Both bring their own preferences, their own plans, and their own ways of living. They step into the sanctuary with a great deal of independence, but in the sacrament of marriage that independence is freely sacrificed for the sake of the relationship as a whole. Also, as these worlds collide, something much deeper about us is revealed: our own brokenness, our weaknesses, our self-centeredness, our cynicism, and our failures. All of these things come crashing together in what would seem to be in the eyes of most people a recipe for the perfect storm.

But this is where the wisdom of God confounds our expectations! In the midst of what could look like a perfect setup for disaster, God sees a locus for sanctification, a place to make us holy. Together we see some old dreams and hopes die, while other are transformed. Most importantly, we see new dreams, new plans, and new hopes emerge, just like God’s very good creation emerged out of a chaotic formless void (Gen 1:2). As we commit ourselves to God and to one another, the Spirit’s power for healing and potential for new creation break into our lives in a new and profound way.

Marriage is a place where we learn to live the cruciform life: life in the self-giving, self-emptying pattern of Jesus. Each day we are challenged again to live into Paul’s words to the Philippians: “In humility consider others as your superiors. Do not attend to your own interests but rather to the interests of others.” There is no easy escaping or avoiding this challenge as we constantly encounter our spouses through the ups and the downs of life together. Each of these moments is a mysterious gift of God that allows us to make the self-emptying story of Jesus our own, sacrificing ourselves for the sake of our spouses.

Marriage is also the best school of reconciliation. In marriage we learn to forgive and to receive forgiveness, both of which can be incredibly difficult. We learn to live in response to the gracious and undeserved forgiveness offered to us by our spouse and by God and give it to others in return. We also learn to forgive others when they damage or wound our husband or wife. This is quite possibly the hardest type of forgiveness: forgiving those who hurt the ones we love. It is much more difficult than forgiving someone for hurting ourselves. But, as a people who are freely loved and freely forgiven, we learn to embody the same love and offer forgiveness to others, to live as reconciled and reconciling people.

In marriage we learn to practice hospitality. Our world sends us the message that we need to protect and insulate ourselves from the dangers of the other. We are constantly erecting barriers between ourselves and others, both literally and metaphorically. As Christians, though, we believe that we model our lives after a God who has chosen to invite all people into his very life. In marriage we learn to open ourselves freely to our spouse, to dare to make ourselves vulnerable to another. This is a risky venture. Sometimes it will leave us wounded, others we will receive unexpected blessing; but, if we remain open to the work of the Spirit, it will always help us to grow and to welcome others as God welcomes them.

Most importantly, the bond and unity of marriage is a mirror and reflection of the triune God. This is the great mystery of two-become-one. Our life together as husband and wife is the closest thing on earth that will resemble the unity of the life of the three-in-one God. In the 8^th century, a Christian named John of Damascus described this inner life of God with the word perichoresis. It’s a word that refuses an exact meaning, but has to do with an intimate cleaving together, a permeating of one another or dwelling in each other. It is probably best imagined as a graceful dance between two lovers, moving and guiding one another, stepping together to become one unified whole. In marriage, we model this God-shaped life for the world: dancing together in the unity of love, looking not to our own interests but to the interests of the other, living as a reconciled and reconciling people, opening our lives with the hospitality of God to receive one another fully.

Today, as I think back on the last five years of life with Natalie, I celebrate the journey, the joy and triumph, the sorrow and pain, I revel in the grace of God for giving me this indescribable gift, I humbly cherish the moments in the crucible of transformation, and I recommit myself to live into the covenant we made to each other before God, our family, and our friends.

How sweet the yoke that joins two of the faithful in the same hope, the same law, the same service! Both are brethren in the service of the same Lord. They are truly two in one and the same flesh. And where the flesh is one, the spirit is one. Together they pray...instructing, encouraging, and supporting each other in turn. They are equal in the Church of God, equal at God’s banquet, they share equally troubles, persecutions, and consolations. They hide nothing from each other, they never avoid each other’s company, they never cause each other pain. Christ rejoices to see such a couple and he gives them his peace. Where they are, there he is himself. – Tertullian, 2^nd – 3^rd C.

This is fowl...

2008-05-29T16:22:00.002-04:00

Today I'm working back through an incredible volume on Philippians by Stephen E. Fowl from the Two Horizons New Testament Commentary Series that I'm requiring for my Pauline Letters class at Rochester College. I was struck again today by the power of some of the things Fowl says, drawing them out of both the implicit and explicit theology of Philippians. I thought I would toss a few out here for thought.

If one sees the aim of the life of discipleship as growing into ever deeper communion with the triune God and with others, then one of the things that contemporary Christians can learn from Paul is this habit of being able to narrate the story both of one's past and one's present circumstances from the perspective of those who have learned their place in Christ's ongoing story. (p. 41)

... Paul's self is de-centered.... The crucified and risen Christ provides both the central point for the drama of God's salvation and central focus for Paul's life. Of course, the fact that one may speak of Paul's self as de-centered does not mean that Paul or any other disciple is free from being responsible for his actions. Paul's is a self in which God is at the center, ordering and opening courses of action in the light of the ends and purposes of god's economy of salvation. Instead of controlling and directing circumstances, the primary task for these theologically de-centered selves have to do with perceiving the movements of this larger drama into which they have been drawn and appropriately fitting themselves into that drama in word and deed. (p. 42)

In a situation where the Roman Empire would be expected to exert a great deal of control over Paul's body, Paul counters that Christ will be magnified by the way in which he comports himself. Whether he lives or dies, Paul's body will be, as he has always been, Christ's text rather than the empire's....
Paul claims here remind us that our actions display aspects of our character as Christians. Christians in America may appear to have far greater control over their bodies than the imprisoned Paul had over his. We would do well to recognize, however, that at the beginning of the twenty-first century all Americans are under unprecedented and minute levels of surveillance. Americans' purchases, reading materials, and the form and content of their communication are under the scrutiny of an extraordinary number of interested parties. [Eric's aside: just notice the household specific coupons you get from your local grocery store. Why do you think they give you that key fob?] At the very least, most of these parties seek to create and manipulate the desires of all of us and to offer alternative narratives into which we all might be tempted to fit our lives....
The desires we manifest, our patterns of consumption, the ways in which we get, hold, and distribute wealth, can all be occasions where either we are disgraced or Christ is magnified. (p. 48)

[All language about God] are attempts to to speak about a mystery toward which humans can only gesture with a variety of different metaphors and analogies. (p. 51)

God's love for us will not allow God to offer us anything less than God's self. (p. 52)

Paul's choice [for life instead of death, Phil 1:20-26] analogously replicates the climactic movement in the divine economy of salvation. Seeing his situation as part of that larger story provides Paul with a compelling exemplar of how he should comport himself in his imprisonment. (p. 52)

Clearly, Paul is not advocating violent opposition to the empire here (1:30). Nevertheless, he makes it very clear that the interests and aims of the church are very different from and largely at variance to the interests and aims of the empire. More generally, once this notion of dual citizenship is applied in a contemporary theological context it starts to demonstrate a tendency toward a posture of accommodation to the modern state. Christian life then becomes a matter of private transactions between believers and God, while the state exercises control over the public lives of Christians.... As modernity has so powerfully shown, this results in a privatizing of Christian convictions so that they can coexist alongside one's loyalty to the state. This allows the state effectively to discipline the church, to destroy the church's identity as the material body of Christ in the world, to co-opt the bodies of believers for service to the state and, ultimately, to erase the possibility of Christian dissent that might be substantial enough to create martyrs. While Christians will need to discuss and discern together the concrete shape of a common life worthy of the gospel in the light of the particular secular orders they find themselves under, they must avoid thinking of themselves as holding dual citizenship. They have one Lord and serve only one master." (p. 61-2)

Christians in the U.S. should not assume that the church here does not suffer state-sponsored opposition because of the benevolence of our government or the protective powers of our constitution. I suspect that it is much more the case that the common life of most churches is so inadequate to the gospel and our disunity so debilitating that the state has nothing to fear from us. (p. 71)

...does the eucharist taste bitter to us in the midst of our divisions? (p. 73)

... the unity or communion of believers is intimately tied to our salvation or communion with God. Thus, if salvation is a gift of God's grace, then the unity of te body of Christ is also a gift of grace. (p. 73)

What do we make in the light of our current situation of division? The most extreme way of putting the matter is to say that the church's witness to the principalities and powers is falsified or undermined by division. At the very least, one must say that the church's witness to the principalities and powers is hindered and frustrated by division. (p. 76)

If church division represents a series of wounds to the one body of Christ, then we must stop anesthetizing ourselves to this wound. (p. 77)

And those are just the things he teases out of Philippians 1!

Confessions of a Cynical Pastor and Reflections of a Humbled Father and Son

2008-05-13T14:31:00.006-04:00

Caveat Lector: This is rambling and poorly woven together. It's more a long, stream-of-consciousness reflection on the last weekend than anything deliberate.

Step 1: Cynicism
I'm cynical by nature. It's not a spiritual gift, but a curse. I don't find it on any of Paul's more positive lists, like the fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5), the "have this mind in you" list (Phil 2), the "clothe yourselves with this stuff" list (Col 3). I tend to get frustrated when I hear people at our community of faith talk about what a "giving congregation" we are. I see the budget, I know where we live and have an idea of what we could probably give as a group, but what I think I know and what I see in our monthly reports are not lining up quite as nicely as the subatomic particles in the wake of the Big Bang.

In my opinion, we have created a communal narrative of who we are that allows us to propagate poor giving. Language is the only game in town and our language belies the reality of our situation... or does it?

Step 2: Confession
This last Friday we discovered that one of our families was in dire straights. They have fallen on very rough financial times and their utilities had all been shut off about 10 days earlier. I went to work to track down the family, finally making contact at their home and assessing the situation to see how we might be able to help. The need was great, young family with several young kids, no electricity to preserve food and milk, no power for heat on Michigan's nippy spring nights.

I contacted our shepherds and our servant who cares for benevolence to see what steps we could/should take. We decided to ask our church family to help out on Sunday morning and then reassess what was needed. So, on Sunday morning brief announcements were made in our classes and a then again at the beginning and close of our worship gathering. Some people wrote checks, others grabbed cash and loose change. People were handing it to elders and our preaching minister during polite handshakes and greetings.

Now, as cynical pastor, I was already anticipating how much we might need to take out of our benevolence fund to help cover the need. On Monday the head of our finance committee sent me an email to let me know that we'd raised over $1200 to help this family in one morning.

Well, at least I got one thing right: our language, our stories shape reality. On Sunday morning, we lived into our best narratives.

God, forgive me for my cynicism and give me new eyes to see your people more clearly.

Step 3: Praxis
I am blessed in my job. There are many occasions when I have the opportunity to take my daughter with me to join in the work of the inbreaking kingdom of God. Today was one of those days. This morning MJ and I had the chance to help bring closure to the situation described above. We drove into Detroit to pay one bill and into Pontiac to pay another. We then put the balance of what was collected on gift cards to help alleviate the family's grocery and gas expenses a bit. Then we went back to see the family and give them payment receipts and the gift cards.

Now, I know that MJ does not understand what is happening right now. How could she? But, she is being formed, shaped, evangelized into a lived narrative, a way of life that is about ushering in the reign of God through embodying the kingdom to and for others. MJ gets to join me in these adventures and gets to have this type of living shape her life. I am just humbled that I get to be a part of it through my own praxis of walking the way of Jesus.

Step 4: Reflection
Now, why am I so confident that this will have a shaping and lasting impact in her life? I feel this way primarily because I know my own story. Now, I've told and written my spiritual autobiography several times, for small groups or as an academic exercise. Today, though, I had a chance to reflect on some very old stories again, this time as a son and a father.

One of the things that most deeply influenced my understanding of the life of faith was watching the way my parents lived the story out in their lives. My parents were sacrificial givers. Now, it didn't always seem that their giving was that sacrificial. We were an Oklahoma family in a para-petroleum company, and things were good when the oil industry was good. I remember when they gave our old station to someone close to our family whose car had broken down. It wasn't a huge sacrifice for them at the time, but it was cultivating a way of life in all of us that would whether the collapse of the oil industry in the 1980s.

In fact, one of the most powerful moments in my spiritual story was the night when I stumbled in on a conversation that my parents were having. To this day I am thankful that I wandered into the kitchen! Let me set the stage a bit. Our lives changed in some significant ways with the oil crash. My dad went without a job for nearly 2 years. We spent a lot of that time living off of college and retirement funds. My sister and I both were in private school at the time and they people there had become our family. We couldn't imagine leaving and our parents never even suggested it. When my dad did finally find a new career opportunity, it was a commission based job in a field that took a lot of time to build a network of connections. So, while we were never in danger of "losing it all" (at least not as far as I know), the financial rivers were not flowing freely.

Then came that night. I waled into the kitchen to discover my parents trying to figure out what they needed to do to pay the school bill. Now, that might not seem too surprising, but what mu sophomoric sophomore ears heard was them discussing three tuition fees. Wanting to be careful to protect one of my peers, they had never told us that they had been paying the tuition for a another family had told the principal that they were going to have to leave the school because of financial problems. The lived story that they wrote when things were good shaped how they continued to live even when the well seemed to have run dry. They had cultivated a mode of living in the world that continued to help them imagine hope in a world that had collapsed on them. They had "hope in the face of dominant despair," as Walter Brueggemann would say.

And their story has become my story, woven into the fabric of who I am and who I hope my daughter will become. Thanks mom and dad for shaping my narrative, and for giving me something to model for my own daughter. I'm eternally grateful. And just maybe, after the experience of this weekend, I'm starting to feel those walls around my cynical heart crumble....

Continuing Communion...

2008-05-06T06:38:00.003-04:00

In light of the post on commun(ion/al) yesterday, I thought that this latest essay by Sara Miles in NPR's This I Believe series was amazing. The essay, called "Strangers Bring Us Closer to God" is about the power of the Eucharistic experience to transform her worldview and mode of living in the world. (Interesting when praxis/experience leads and transforms our belief which then transforms our praxis experience....)

A few excerpts:

That first communion knocked me upside-down. Faith turned out not to be abstract at all, but material and physical. I’d thought Christianity meant angels and trinities and being good. Instead, I discovered a religion rooted in the most ordinary yet subversive practice: a dinner table where everyone is welcome, where the despised and outcasts are honored.

But I learned that hunger can lead to more life—that by sharing real food I’d find communion with the most unlikely people; that by eating a piece of bread I’d experience myself as part of one body. This I believe: that by opening ourselves to strangers, we will taste God.

Commun(ion/al) Experience

2008-05-05T07:54:00.003-04:00

At the end of a brief reflection on a conversation he led at the state gathering of Disciples of Christ in Tulsa, OK recently, Alan Roxburgh made this observation about his communion experience:

One final observation of a personal nature - it’s a bit of a strange one. For the past several years I’ve been part of an Anglican church. We go forward together at communion to receive the bread and wine (a real chunk of bread and real wine). I sometimes find my self standing in this little line as we move toward the altar with my little grandchildren beside me - it’s one of those moments when you are rooted in the ordinary and everyday in the midst of the mystery of God. Today, as we had communion I was aware of sitting in a pew as the plastic cups of grape juice were passed along followed by little pellets of hard bread. I suddenly felt quite alone and isolated in this moment of the body of Christ.

Roxburgh's important observation should cause those of us in the Churches of Christ, as those who share Stone-Campbell DNA with our brothers and sisters in the Disciples, about our own practice of the Lord's Supper.

How does our practice of the Supper impact our theology of the Lord's Supper?

Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? In other words, how do our exegesis/theology of the Eucharist and our experience dialogue with, interact with, and transform one another?

Does our practice of the supper actually reinforce the idea that faith is a private experience and interaction between and individual and God or does it connect us to the greater Body of those "in Christ"? Are we "alone and isolated" or "together and unified" when receiving and experiencing the Supper?

How does our LS practice shape us to be the people of God in the world?

Do we receive the hospitality of God in our experience? Do we truly receive the O/other?

Alright, just a few questions that popped into my mind while reading Roxburgh when taking a break from reading student exams this morning.

Unexpected Solidarity - A Living Encounter with Theology

2008-04-29T13:45:00.005-04:00

Last night we made a fabulous meal. Homemade Kung Pao Chicken. It's one of our favorites, but for some reason we hadn't made it in a while. It's a simple dish to make, if you've got the right ingredients. Natalie went to mixing the sauce and then started to brown peanuts and cook the chicken and peppers in our cast iron skillet. I grabbed a freshly sharpened blade out of our Henckels knife block and began to chop scallions and garlic and grate fresh ginger. Some edamame was cooking on the top burner, and the aromatics were brilliantly beginning to fill up the room.

As we poured the sauce and the chopped scallions into the skillet, I noticed that something was missing. RICE! Now, this was an Asian meal. Rice is a staple part of this feast. In the midst of our busyness and preparation of the chicken dish, we forgot the foundational member of the meal. All of the sudden, we were more than a little perturbed. The chicken would be ready in about two minutes; cooking our TJ's jasmine rice would take nearly an hour. So, what should we do?

At the end of the day we made the frustrating but unavoidable call to skip the rice and go without our grains. Natalie and I dolefully dragged our plates to the table, not even thinking about grabbing our Thai chopsticks out of their canister, and sat down. MJ was blissfully ignorant and chomping away at some broccoli and chicken.

As it so happened it was my turn for the pre-meal family prayer. Melaina was unexpectedly ready to pray with us. (She's hit and miss, depending on how hungry she is. Let's just say the girl loves to pray, but she also loves to eat! The spirit and the flesh duke it out on that one! :-) ) Looking back, I wonder if with that strange children's intuition she might have sensed our disappointment and frustration and been ready to pay attention to how our prayers and our "incomplete" meal would collide. Maybe she was ready for the unexpected intrusion of the God, but I wasn't.

As we grabbed hands, bowed heads, and began to pray, a single vision flooded my brain: "silent tsunami." Here we were, the privileged of the world, with freshly bought and prepared food, with an overflowing table, forlorn and dejected over the missing rice, while around the world millions are suffering from the lack of their most basic staples. The poorest of the poor are being threatened by an ongoing food shortage that is driving up costs of staple grains and "plunged an extra 100 million people into poverty."

The catalysts for this perfect storm are many: shortsightedness regarding using staples as an alternative fuel source and the subsequent allocating of crop fields for bio-fuel production, skyrocketing costs of fossil fuels, and increase in demand from those in the middle class around the world who are being hit by increasing financial pressures in other areas of life. This is just to name a few factors.

Yet, here we were, faced with a choice: continue to eat in our frustration or recognize a little bit of solidarity with those who didn't have a choice to buy rice last night. Now, even in saying that, I recognize that our table was still an overflowing feast, especially compared to those in such dire straights right now. I am not diminishing their plight and say that our lack of foresight in meal prep is close to their condition. That would be a grievous sin on my part. Instead, I found myself forced to remember at table the plight of those who didn't have a choice of whether or not they would eat rice. I was brought, for a moment, into communion with them, if only in thought and in prayer. My frustrations and concerns slipped away, as I was reminded of them.

It was an unexpected solidarity, a forced encounter with a theology I so often want to leave confined to the realm of words and pages and books. Last night, I was drawn into an experience that forced me to encounter a very small part of the reality of other's lives, wrestle with it, and bring it into the presence of God.

This is not always something we do well in my middle class church. In some ways we're blue collar, but in others, we struggle to embrace the realities of the world the people leave to enter worship and into which they return after the benediction. (For a great discussion on this, read the transcript of Bill Moyers' interview with Rev. Jeremiah Wright.) Of course, I read and experience life as a privileged person, who has never really known want, even during the seasons of family unemployment during the oil crisis of the 80s. Yet, tonight I was reminded of what I try to teach, that the world of the biblical narrative must encounter the world of our lives. It was a holy frustration, a crash forcing solidarity.

Today, I read this prayer from Walter Brueggemann's Prayers for a Privileged People.

"Water That Does Not Come Bottled": On reading Psalm 104

Creator God, we celebrate you:
you make springs gush forth in the valleys;
they flow between the hills,
giving drink to every wild animal,
the wild asses quench their thirst.

You send rain and water the earth, it springs to growth,
we eat and are satisfied,
we thank you and easily push back from the table.
In our comfortable plenty,
we notice drought here
and famine there, the work of human hands.
The lacks seem remote from us,
but in solidarity we register the loss,
and the fear,
and the death.

We count on water and rain and growth and bread.
We count on your regularities,
but then we look for peace but find no good,
for a time of healing, but there is terror instead.

We do not expect failed rain,
or failed bread,
or failed peace,
or failed healing.
The failure lies deep in the fabric of our common life.

We turn away from that self-destructiveness . . . back to you.
You--Creator, beginning and end,
first and last.
You--seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter.
You--whose patience we try.
You--whose sovereign will for good
overrides our capacity for self-destruction.

Look to this world of need: restore,
recreate,
enliven,
give rain,
give food,
give peace.
For there is no other source.
None except you in your sovereign reliability.

God, forgive us and restore our hearts of flesh, so that our hearts may break with your heart for the weak, the vulnerable, the powerless, the poorest of the poor.

For we do not proclaim ourselves...

2008-04-21T09:01:00.002-04:00

"For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake." (2 Cor 4:5)

As I've been thinking more about the previous post this morning, I've been struck by this verse. I come from a tradition that isn't too big on testimony, especially when it comes to sharing how God has been working in and through the things we've done for others. Let me be clear. There are some people in my community of faith who would prefer not to have people to share experiences like the one I described below, because they are think we are "tooting our own horn." Now, I know that some of this stems from a desire to not be like the religious leaders who stand on the street corner touting their holiness, but this overly pietistic approach has stolen an invaluable asset of the people of God: our own experiences, narratives, and stories as a means of discerning the work of God.

Consider for example the text from 2 Cor 4:5 above. Now it seems to support the line of thinking that would have us minimize testimony and experiential narration in our public gatherings. But, then consider the verse in its context. The entire chapter, along with the surrounding chapters, is simply lofty theory and makes little sense outside of the very real, concrete experiences and subsequent stories of being afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, and struck down. Each of these words carries with it the weight of story. With each one, memories of experiences come flooding into the mind: the experiences of Paul and his companions, the experiences of others throughout history, the experience of friends, my own experiences.

Narrating our faith is vital for the people of God to recover the ability to discern what God is doing in the world and how, as a friend and student of mine put it recently, the Word of Scripture has hermeneutic value today. If this story, the drama of Scripture, will truly be our story, then we must tell our own stories so that they find a home and a new life in its light.

Backed Up Sewage and a Cracked, Afflicted, and Perplexed Life...

2008-04-21T07:05:00.005-04:00

Yesterday one of our members shared about an experience that he had with three other guys on Wednesday night. They were working together at woman's house as a part of our "Hands of the Master" missional outreach. (Basically, it's a group of gifted and skilled folks who offer their time, energy, and resources to help address the physical needs of folks in our community: car repairs, house repairs, painting, building stuff, etc. If you want more info on this incredible ministry, let me know.) The group is a fabulous example of the ways in which the gospel, the reign of God, can continue to break into our communities through us when we recognize that we are a sent people and follow God into the world. Back to the story...

On Wednesday, four guys went to help a woman who had been experiencing a major clog in her kitchen sink for about two months. Now, that's eight weeks of build up clogging, molding, and rotting in her pipes. They tried to use a snake that they had to break the clog free, but to no avail. So, they decided that they needed to cut the drain pipe, clear the clog out of the system, and rebuild the piping.

Well, two guys mainly watched (remember, we're a union town! :-) ) while the other two went to work went into her crawl and went to work. They "succeeded," which is to say that they successfully cut the pipe and got the stuff to pour out. Now, by pouring out we mean that the nasty, rotten build up was running all over them. The sewage and the stench were so bad that one of the guys who was just watching said he got dry heaves the next morning because the stench was so strong that it took up residence in his lungs and throat over night. (This part of the story may be apocryphal, but it's what we're sticking to right now!) They were finally able

The gentleman that shared the story yesterday spent as much time talking about the impact that the experience had on him as anything else. He struggled to imagine that he could be the presence of Christ, the bearer of "good news," in her life right now. He went in skeptical, critical, and frustrated. Her house was dirty and cluttered, and he wondered if she really deserved their help. He has been through a long season of struggle, longing to embrace the way of the cross more fully, but hitting resistance from family and friends who don't imagine the life of discipleship the same way that he does. He went there beaten down by life and faith. He went there jaded by skepticism. He went there as a pot, a clay pot, being dangerously threatened to be crushed, driven to despair, destroyed.

But while he was there he encountered the dying and risen Christ, manifested and living in the presence of two guys who all too literally bore the aroma of Christ, a stench of death that just defies explanation and comprehension. They carried around the death of Jesus in their bodies that night, not simply so that the life of Jesus might be revealed in this woman's life, but in the life of their brother, who needed to experience a bit of resurrection through witnessing their death. His testimony was a powerful example of what can happen when we live together with God for the world, when the narrative of Scripture becomes our primary story to make sense of the world.

I sat there in worship, listening to his testimony and through to myself, we should jettison all of our plans for the morning right now. We're on holy ground. This is a time to stop for a moment in silence. This is a time to share life, for koinonia. This is a time for others to narrate their stories, to provide encouragement. This is a time for us to read Scripture, whatever comes to mind, and discern the work of God in light of the biblical text and our own experience. This is a time, not for losing heart, but for an inner renewal among our gathering of the people of God.

Obviously, you can imagine where my mind was yesterday. I was hearing and interpreting his story through the lens of 2 Cor 4-5. So, this is what I would like for you to do (assuming you've made it this far in the post): a little e-community group lectio divina. Find some time today to sit down with you bible or go to 2 Cor 4 here. Maybe you want to find a place where you can light a candle as a reminder of the presence of God in your midst. Pray this simply prayer as you begin to read: "Living God, help me hear your word for me." Read the passage slowly, meditatively. Don't rush through the text as if it is a task you need to accomplish before getting on to the important question answering section. Live in the passage. Notice what catches your attention, excites your imagination, or poses a difficulty for you. Jot down some of those things. Then take some time to answer the following.

Where do you recognize your own life in this text?

Read the passage again and answer this question:

In this text, how is God calling people to join his work in the world?

Finally, read the passage one more time and answer this question:

What repentance would be necessary for you and your community of faith to join the work of God suggested by this text more fully?

Take some time to jot your thoughts down as comments on this post. It would be fabulous to get a little virtual communal insight, dialogue, and wisdom flowing here.

May the God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," illuminate our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus.

Safe and Warm and Loved

2008-04-17T09:05:00.002-04:00

I teach a class of 1st thru 6th graders on Wednesday nights at my community of faith. (Yes, that's a huge age range.) Last week we spent some time thinking bout what it means to be loved. The students had some reflective time to journal on the question "What makes you feel safe and warm and loved?" My favorite response came from a 6th grade boy, who said:

"It's like your parents. They hug you and then they say those stupid embarrassing comments that you learn to appreciate later."

Oh, the wisdom of children....

Between Memory and Amnesia

2008-04-13T08:06:00.002-04:00

In my last post, I wrote about the good news that God is a God who remembers. Today I'm being haunted by memory. Nearly two and a half years ago some folks wrote a painful document in which they attacked me by name and several others anonymously by association. In my opinion it was a scathing, vindictive, subversive attack, intended to cause personal harm and to inflict extreme pain.

But today, as I've been sitting in my quiet office long before others will arrive for classes and worship, I've been haunted by my memory of those days. I re-skimmed the 18 pages this morning for the first time in probably two years. (Whether a good idea or not, I could not resist the siren call of the file.) I'm still thankful for the godly man who called me to say, "We need to get together and talk." A couple had approached him with the document and attempted to turn him against me. He, in an amazingly grace-filled and humble posture, approached me to talk to me about the document, his conversation, and what I really thought, believed, and was trying to accomplish in my ministry at LO. I continue to thank God for this man and his choice to come to me.

I'd be lying if I tried to say that those events haven't impacted and affected me. My family and I will never be the same. The experience haunts us and affects our ability to trust others. (It was people we had trusted most who wrote the piece.) The scars and wounds of those days will continue to live with us, though we trust that the resurrection power of God will somehow bring life even to this.

Today memory is my enemy.... Yet, I've boasted that God's remembering is gospel.

So, today I'm reminded that the Christian faith tends to constantly navigate and the balance extremes. In nearly all theological topics, the true place of faith is found in the tension of the middle. Today, I'm reminded that the promise that God is a God who remembers must be held in tension with the promise that God is a God who forgets.

"The former things shall not be remembered." "I will remember your sins no more." "As far as the east is from the west." What promises! Thanks be to God for his indescribable amnesia!

God remembers... GOOD NEWS! God forgets... GOOD NEWS!

But as with most theological topics, we tend to gravitate toward one pole or the other. When you think about God at this point in your life, which image of God gives you more solace, encouragement, and strength: the God who remembers or the God who forgets? Why?

A God who Remembers

2008-04-08T14:03:00.004-04:00

I love the Old Testament narrative because, if we dare to let them, they have a way of slowly tearing into and unraveling our nice, tidy, dogmatic theology. All of our omni- and meta- words struggle to make it to the end of story, which refuses closure, begs for constant return, and dares for a truly new encounter with a fresh revelatory word at each reading, each rendering. Narrative refuses to be succumb to our attempts to own or control it. Our power crumbles before it's power to reshape our lives and to give us new eyes to see ourselves, our world, and our God.

Of course, this is also one of the reasons that we relegate the biblical narratives to children's literature. We prefer to spend our time reading what we think are easy to mine theological gems and propositional statements from the Paul's attempts to provide a systematic "pattern" for the church to follow. (Of course, even this is a faulty assumption, as Paul's letters were really a witness to the way communities must continue to struggle with the grand narrative of what God has done in light of the community's own experience in the world. But, reading Paul's letters as narrative is another topic for another day.)

That is one of the things I love about teaching Genesis. The stories in Genesis have this nasty habit of sweeping our presumptive legs right out from under us. We come to the end of a terrifying story like the binding or near sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22 (a tale that's been quite sanitized in the NT) and hear God's messenger say these words: "Now I know that you fear God." "Now I know." This is a startling phrase that confounds our glib assertions that God is all-knowing. Abraham is not alone in this test. Both God and Abraham learn something through this ordeal, they are both changed. (The implications of this ordeal on Isaac and Sarah are another startling conversation for a different time. Let the reader know that their presence and absence in this story, along with the important voices that sensitive readers like Phyllis Trible try to give them, are not being ignored.)

Narrative continues to confound our control, critique our comfortability. But that's what makes it powerful, indispensable, vital to our faith. As Walter Brueggemann continually reminds us, if we are going to be Christians, the only God we've got is the God in the text. And we only discover this God by humbly and willingly bringing our lives into story.

So, today I'm thinking about the double-edged sword of a God who remembers. I've been thinking about this in light of a fabulous little essay called "A God who Remembers" by Elie Wiesel at NPR's "This I Believe." This is an important little phrase is carries with it a great deal of hope, but stained with a despairing possibility.

"Then God remembered." The words jump off of the pages as gospel, good news to those who hear. Don't they inspire something in you? Imagine just two cases that stand near the beginning of Israel's confessional testimony. The first is actually in the primordial history, before Israel was a blip on the radar screen. Genesis 7 ends with an ambivalent editorial note, at best, as the narrator says, "Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark. And the waters swelled on the earth for one hundred and fifty days." The final line causes the dissonant score of chaos to begin to play in our minds, as we remember tohu wabohu, the formless void, which God had to take to create the world in Genesis 1. We are left with Noah and his family all alone, and we wonder were God is. The narrator doesn't tell us, he leaves us to wonder, to struggle with the question of God's absence. But, then comes that gospel word, "But God remembered Noah" (8:1).

Or, consider this example from Israel's (what shall we call it?) gestational period. Israel finds itself, like Noah, bobbing up and down in a chaotic sea, where things wreak of death more than life. They find themselves in captivity in Egypt, far from the land that was promised to Abraham so long ago. They were not just exiles from the promised land, but slaves to the man, to Pharaoh, to a forgetful people whose memories of Joseph were short-lived. "The Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out." (Strange that it seems that their own memory is short. They don't seem to know to whom they should be crying.) "Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them" (Ex 2:23-5). Out of the depths of their despair, out of the hopelessness of slavery, out from under the thumb of a tyranical oppressor, God remembered. Gospel.

My struggle is that this remembering isn't nice and tidy. It is a sweet and sour gospel, a Thai food gospel that somehow manages to hit every spot on the palate. The sweet reminder that God is a God who remembers comes laced with the sour reminder that God just might forget or, at the very least, that something could slip out of God's mind or that God might get side tracked for a while. It took a long floating journey for God to remember Noah, a desperate cry for help for God to "[take] notice" of Israel. That's the power of narrative. It won't be easily conformed to our rose-tinted desires.

But, in spite of that bleak possibility of God's "forgetting", the storytellers make a daring and bold a assertion that this God, the God these stories, is a God who remembers. Or, as Wiesel concludes, "After all, God is God because he remembers." And we discover, just as Noah and Israel discovered, that when God remembers, gospel happens.

O give thanks to Yahweh, for he is good: for his steadfast love endures forever....
It is he who remembered us in our low estate: for his steadfast love endures forever...
O give thanks to the god of heaven: for his steadfast love endures forever. (Ps. 136:1, 23, 26)

James Cone - Father of Black Liberation Theology

2008-04-01T13:16:00.003-04:00

This is a great interview from yesterday with James Cone, the father of black liberation theology.

His incredibly powerful and important books include: God of the Oppressed; A Theology of Black Liberation; For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church.

A couple of the very good points of which he makes and reminds us in this interview....

JC: "It makes a difference out of which context you read the Bible."

TG: "Describe what your church was like."

JC: "When we black people came to church on Sunday, we experienced a reality that let us know that we were God's children, not somebody else's maid, somebody else's janitor.... Church was the place that affirmed your somebodyness in a society that treated you as nobodies. That's why I discovered [in church] as a little child."

Sufjan Stevens - Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing

2008-03-28T15:50:00.000-04:00

Lent and Confession...

2008-02-19T11:13:00.006-05:00

I come from a tradition where confession is typically relegated to one of the five fingers of the old "five-fingered exercise" made famous by Walter Scott and others: "hear, believe, repent, confession, be baptized." This relegates confession to the profession of a statement about one's understanding of the identity of Jesus and his role in the greater salvation history and life and action of God in the world. While this is a very valid facet to "confession," it is definitely only one side of the equation.

Confession has a much deeper place in the history of Christianity, especially at this time of year. As I write this, I find myself in the middle of the second week of the Lenten season, a time of introspection, reflection, transformation, and, yes, confession. During Lent, we discover the important place of confession in the process of transformation. Confession opens us up to the confronting work of the Spirit of God. Yet, sometimes, perhaps most of the time, we find ourselves pushing ahead with the masses at such a breakneck pace that "pausing," stopping for confession, is an impossible task.

Perhaps that is why Kierkegaard's Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing is one of my Lenten favorites. I continually find myself pulling this tattered, partially digested (by Shiloh, the family Labrador!) book off of the shelf around this time each year. The book is Kierkegaard's take on the "spiritual preparation for the Office of Confession" in the church. (The prayer that opens and closes that book are worth the price of the volume.) I leave you with these excerpts that serve as his summation of the volume:

My listener! Do you remember now, how this talk began? Let me call it back to you remembrance. It is true that the temporal order has its time; but the Eternal shall always have time. If this should not happen within a man’s life, then the Eternal comes again under another name, and once again shall always have time. This is repentance. And since at present no man’s life is lived in perfection, but each one in frailty, so Providence has given man two companions for his journey, one calls him forward, the other calls him back. But the call of repentance [the call back] is always at the eleventh hour, but not in the sense of being precipitate. For confession is a holy act, which calls for a collected mind. A collected mind is a mind that has collected itself from every distraction, from every relation, in order to center itself upon this relation to itself as an individual who is responsible to God. It is a mind that has collected itself from every distraction, and therefore also from all comparison. For comparison may either tempt a man to an earthly and fortuitous despondency because the one who compares must admit to himself that he is behind many others, or it may tempt him to pride, because, humanly speaking, he seems to be ahead of many others.

A new expression of the true extremity of the eleventh hour comes when the penitent has withdrawn himself from every relation in order to center himself upon his relation to himself as an individual. By this he becomes responsible for every relation in which he ordinarily stands, and he is outside of any comparison. The more use one makes of comparison, the more it seems that there is still plenty of time. The more a man makes use of comparison, the more indolent and the more wretched his life becomes. But when all comparison is relinquished forever then a man confesses as an individual before God—and he is outside any comparison, just as the demand which purity of heart lays upon him is outside of comparison. Purity of heart is what God requires of him and the penitent demands it of himself before God. Yes, it is just on this account that he confesses his sins. And heavy as the way and the hour of the confession may be, yet the penitent wins the Eternal. He is strengthened in the consciousness that he is an individual, and in the task of truthfully willing only one thing….

For pausing [answering the companion calling one back] is not a sluggish response. Pausing is also movement. It is the inward movement of the heart. To pause is to deepen oneself in inwardness. But merely going further is to go straight in the direction of superficiality. But that way one does not come to will only one thing. Only if at sometime he decisively stopped going further and then again came to a pause, as he went further, only then could he will only one thing.

Father in Heaven! What is a man without Thee! What is all that he knows, vast accumulation though it be, but a chipped fragment if he does not know Thee! What is all his striving, could it even encompass the world, but a half-finished work if he does not know Thee: Thee the One, who art one thing and who are all! So may Thou give to the intellect, wisdom to comprehend that one thing; to the heart, sincerity to receive this understanding; to the will, purity that wills only one thing. In prosperity may Thou grant perseverance to will one thing; amid distractions, collectedness to will one thing; in suffering, patience to will one thing. Oh, Thou that giveth both the beginning and the completion, may Thou early, at the dawn of day, give to the young man the resolution to will one thing. As the day wanes, may Thou give to the old man a renewed remembrance of his first resolution, that the first may be like the last, the last like the first, in possession of a life that has willed only one thing. Alas, but this has indeed not come to pass. Something has come in between. The separation of sin lies in between. Each day, and day after day something is being placed in between: delay, blockage, interruption, delusion, corruption. So in this time of repentance may Thou give the courage once again to will one thing. True, it is an interruption of our daily tasks; we do lay down our work as though it were a day of rest, when the penitent (and it is only in a time of repentance that the heavy-laden worker may be quiet in the confession of sin) is alone before Thee in self-accusation. This is indeed an interruption. But it is an interruption that searches back into its very beginnings that it might bind up anew that which sin has separated that in its grief might atone for lost time, that in its anxiety in might bring to completion that which lies before it. Oh, Thou that givest both the beginning and the completion, give Thou victory in the day of need so that what neither a man’s burning wish nor his determined resolution may attain to, may be granted unto him in the sorrowing of repentance: to will only one thing.

(From Purity of Heart, 216-219)

Share Your Passion: Courting Wisdom: The Discipline of Study

2008-02-15T15:15:00.002-05:00

I spoke in assembly today as a part of an ongoing series at Rochester College entitled Share Your Passion. After spending some time thinking through some of the aspects of the Christian life that I love with Sara Barton, the campus minister, we decided that it might be good for students to hear about my passion for study.

Here is my manuscript from the event.

“Share Your Passion”: Courting wisdom…

I guess that it’s appropriate to start this “sharing my passion” time today by talking about a tale of teenage passion. I guess the first time I really noticed her was in my English class as a freshman in high school. Looking back, she had surely been there all along, but I don’t really remember taking notice of her. There was something intriguing, something passionate and inspiring, even mysterious, about her. She not only caught my eye but captured my imagination. We flirted, but only at a distance. I was cautious, questioning, and unsure; but somehow I knew that I loved her.

After a long summer of great but nearly mindless youth group fun, I came back to school as a sophomore. I was on pins and needles, passing by rows of lockers, to step into each new class, anxious to discover if she would be sitting in one of the chairs. At last, there she was. We were in A.P. Biology together. I should have expected it: A.P. Biology. Somehow I knew then that we were meant to be, destined to journey together through life; I wondered if she knew the same thing.

My heart continued to pound in my chest throughout that year and over the next two years. I found myself following her to Harding, hoping to fan the flame of the passion that I knew and felt inside. Looking back on it all from today, fifteen to twenty years later, it seems like I’m such a different person. Many of my hopes and dreams for my life have changed. Time will do that to you. But, I can safely say that I love that allusive, passionate, enigmatic, inspiring girl even more today than I did when I was a temperamental, cocky fifteen year-old or an unsure, questioning college freshman.

I guess it’s right about now that I should be watching Natalie to see if she’s squirming in her seat. See, Natalie was not my high school love; in fact, we didn’t meet until years later, when I was at my third graduate school and she was an undergrad. But, don’t worry. This girl of my dreams, this object of my affection and devotion isn’t simply another woman, but is wisdom herself. That’s right; Terrill gets to talk about cooking; I’m the nerdy guy who is passionate about study.

That’s what I want to talk about today. I want to think for a few minutes about the discipline of study, the passionate of the pursuit of wisdom. I didn’t have the language to talk about it then, no way to make sense of the passion that was rising in me, but I found it in Proverbs. Hear the word of the Lord:

Listen, children, to a father’s instruction,
and be attentive, that you may gain^* insight;
²for I give you good precepts:
do not forsake my teaching.
³When I was a son with my father,
tender, and my mother’s favourite,
⁴he taught me, and said to me,
‘Let your heart hold fast my words;
keep my commandments, and live.
⁵Get wisdom; get insight: do not forget, nor turn away
from the words of my mouth.
⁶Do not forsake her, and she will keep you;
love her, and she will guard you.
⁷The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom,
and whatever else you get, get insight.
⁸Prize her highly, and she will exalt you;
she will honour you if you embrace her.
⁹She will place on your head a fair garland;
she will bestow on you a beautiful crown.’

(Proverbs 4:1-9)

Here’s what I love about this passage and all of Proverbs 1-9. Here, a father or teacher uses the metaphor of wisdom as a woman. He exhorts his son to court and marry Woman Wisdom, to love and cherish her. This is a passionate story of romance, of reckless abandon and deep attachment. But this is not a tragedy. In fact, the teachers understand that this courting of wisdom actually spares the tragedy of falling into the grasp of Dame Folly. Now that I’m married, I realize that this makes a lot of sense.

Study, the pursuit of wisdom is a vital part of our life with God, a key element to discipleship. In fact, as the theologian Anselm once said, discipleship is about faith seeking understanding. The teachers in Proverbs understood this. They realized that “faith seeks understanding passionately and relentlessly, or it languishes and eventually dies.” Faith is a continual dance with God and our experiences and questions are the music that drive our steps and guide us to deeper understanding and fuller transformation. It’s a holistic union of all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

There are two aspects of this metaphor that I want to explore with you today.

The first, is in marriage we discover that we are engaged with a mysterious subject. I think back over the time that I’ve spent with Natalie, through friendship, courtship, and marriage. I have spent over five years studying and learning Natalie. But she’s not simply an object to be analyzed in the safe confines of a laboratory or a problem to be solved. She is a living subject. She is always just beyond the grasp of my mind. Each step along the way, I get to know her a little more fully. But everything I know is provisional and open to surprising change. Because I love Natalie so deeply and passionately, I can never stop pursuing her, trying to understand her afresh, more fully and more completely, even though sometimes the quest leads to new questions, rather than answers.

The same is true of our love of God. As Christians we have faith in a living God, a God that remains a mystery beyond our comprehension. “While a problem can be solved, a mystery is inexhaustible.” And a mystery demands humility; or as Luke Johnson likes to say, we must have “modesty before the mystery.” Our faith in the reality and presence of the living and mysterious God is the starting point, the foundation and the driving force behind our searching and study. If God is living, we must expect for our foundations to be shaken, that our assumptions will be confounded. We will have to become seekers, pilgrims, pioneers with no residence. We will no longer be satisfied with our unexamined beliefs, assumptions, and practices. We want to know all that we can know about God and God’s world. As long as we remain pilgrims of faith, we will continue to raise questions – hard questions – for which we will not always have the answers. Often our questions will lead to new sets of questions, rather than answers. But this is a part of our courtship and marriage with wisdom.

In our courtship of wisdom, not only are we engaging a mysterious subject, but we do so within the the reality of a particular historical context.

Natalie and I live in a real historical situation, not a vacuum. Each new day and each new situation has its own distinctive problems and possibilities. Some of the things that sustained our relationship when we first met in Abilene or shortly after we moved to Michigan no longer suffice today. We continue to move through both the joys and the struggles of life, through seasons where things seem as vibrant as a blooming spring and others that seem as chaotic and uncontrollable as the darkness of winter. Yet, we embrace the difficulty and the struggle, just as fully as we do the times of joy. We are committed to wade through the wilderness of confusion together, trusting that as we do, we’ll emerge as something bigger, something better, something new.

The same is true of our life with God. Our faith does not live in a vacuum. We are in relationship with God today, in our time and in our culture. “Our changing, ambiguous, and often precarious world poses ever new questions for faith, and many answers that sufficed yesterday are no longer compelling for us today. Questions arise at the edges of what we can know and what we can do as people” (Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding). The questions thrust themselves on us with special force in times and situations of crisis, when we can not reconcile our experiences in life with the faith we profess, when we encounter sickness or suffering, guilt, struggle, and death. It is then that the spinning disorientation drives us either to revert and try to hide in the safety of old answers that will no longer suffice or to strive for wisdom, seeking new possibilities and solutions with the help of God.

That is why our pursuit of wisdom, study, is a vital part of discipleship. One the one hand it inspires in us an ever deeper passion for God; on the other, it is driven by our passionate pursuit of God. So now, while you are here in a community that can help nurture your pursuit and love of God, I implore you to cultivate a deep and lasting love for wisdom that will last a lifetime.

It is on days like today that we are reminded of the necessity of the pursuit of wisdom, when tragedy strikes, as it has at just yesterday at Northern Illinois University. The deep disconnect between our faith and our experiences in life drive us back to the dance floor to dance the dark waltz of disorientation with wisdom, trusting that the steps will bring us to a new connection with and understanding of God as the last note of the music fades.

Hope against Dominant Despair...

2008-02-03T16:53:00.001-05:00

I was directed to this video from a good friend of mine. As I watched, I was reminded of some work by Walter Brueggemann, a favorite Old Testament scholar, who describes the task of the church to with three moves in our contemporary cultural climate: (1) to mediate a memory of generosity in the face of a dominate culture of amnesia (because our culture says what is past is over and done, importing the past into the present is devalued and delegitimated in a culture that prizes the new); (2) to mediate hope of utter fidelity into all futures in a dominate text of despair (it is difficult to deny that our culture and its power brokers thrive on propagating narratives of fear and despair, rather than hope in our closed, limited goods world, both economic and interpersonal); and (3) mediate and embody covenantal neighborliness in the face of dominant anxious selfishness and alienated greed.

While I know that there is a strong appeal to pathos here, I am amazed at how this video instilled some of these very feelings, emotions, and convictions in me. It is worth the 4 minutes.

Jesus Saves, I Spend

2007-11-23T08:30:00.000-05:00

It's that time of year again, when people make their lists and check them twice. Today has been affectionately called "Black Friday" by many in the retail industry. Why? Most likely because today will be the one day of the year that ensures that they will finish the year in the black financially.

So, today, in the spirit of Black Friday and the blooming holiday spirit, I offer this great little song by St. Vincent.

"Jesus Saves, I Spend" (Lyrics)
St. Vincent

While Jesus is saving, I'm spending all my days
In backgrounds and landscapes
With the languages of saints
While people are spending, like toys on Christmas day
And inside a still life with the other absentee

While Jesus is saving, I'm spending all my daysI
In the garden, great power of lines across your face
While people will cheer on the spectacle we've made
I'm sitting and sculpting menageries of saints

All my men
My absentee
I'd do anything to please
You go my love
The stage is waiting
Be the one to save my saving grace

While Jesus is saving, I'm spending all my grace
On the rosy red power of lights on center stage
While people have cheered on the awful mess we've made
Through storms of red roses we've exited the stage

Put the Lights on the Tree

2007-11-20T16:31:00.001-05:00

The season starts. I know that we've already talked about trying to carve out time this week to decorate the tree and get the Advent wreath ready for December 2. So, here's a little something to get you in the holiday spirit from Sufjan Stevens, one of the most imaginative, ingenious artists out there.

A Litany of Thanksgiving

2007-11-20T10:29:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about thanksgiving this past week, both for a class I recently taught (see post bel0w) and for a Thanksgiving Eve celebration we're planning for tomorrow night at LO. As I've been looking around, I discovered this Litany of Thanksgiving in the Book of Common Worship. I think it's a wonderful prayer....

Give thanks to the Lord who is good.

God's love is everlasting.

Come, let us praise God joyfully.

Let us come to God with thanksgiving.

For the good world;
for things great and small, beautiful and awesome;
for seen and unseen splendors;

Thank you, God.

For human life;
for talking and moving and thinking together;
for common hopes and hardships shared from birth until our dying;

Thank you, God.

For work to do and strength to work;
for the comradeship of labor;
for exchanges of good humor and encouragement;

Thank you, God.

For marriage;
for the mystery and joy of flesh made one;
for mutual forgiveness and burdens shared;
for secrets kept in love;

Thank you, God.

For family;
for living together and eating together;
for family amusements and family pleasures;

Thank you, God.

For children;
for their energy and curiosity;
for their brave play and startling frankness;
for their sudden sympathies;

Thank you, God.

For the young;
for their high hopes;
for their irreverence toward worn-out values;
for their search for freedom;
for their solemn vows;

Thank you, God.

For growing up and growing old;
for wisdom deepened by experience;
for rest in leisure;
and for time made precious by its passing;

Thank you, God.

For your help in times of doubt and sorrow;
for healing our diseases;
for preserving us in temptation and danger;

Thank you, God.

For the church into which we have been called;
for the good news we receive by Word and Sacrament;
for our life together in the Lord;

We praise you, God.

For your Holy Spirit;
who guides our steps and brings us gifts f faith and love;
who prays in us and prompts our grateful worship;

We praise you, God.

Above all, O God, for your Son Jesus Christ,
who lived and died and lives again for our salvation;
for our hope in him; and for the joy of serving him;

We thank and praise you, Eternal God,
for all your goodness to us.

Give thanks to the Lord, who is good.

God's love is everlasting.

Quote for the day...

2007-11-20T07:29:00.000-05:00

Merely to resist evil with evil, by hating those who hate us and seeking to destroy them, is actually no resistance at all. It is active and purposeful collaboration in evil that brings the Christian into direct and intimate contact with the same source of evil and hatred which inspires the acts of his enemy. It leads in practice to a denial of Christ and to the service of hatred rather than love.

Thomas Merton, Passion for Peace

A quote for the day...

2007-11-19T22:02:00.000-05:00

We participate in the possibility of becoming faith mentors by opening our lives to God at work in us and nurturing our own spiritual journeys. We live as if we are faith mentors, and we use our skills and faith on behalf of others in the hope that God will work through us for their growth in faith. With humility, we provide guidance and discernment for those who are seeking for meaning in their lives. And we live in the hope that others will experience us as faith mentors, knowing it is not a title we may claim for ourselves.

- Sondra Higgins Matthaei

Prayers of Thanksgiving in a Cynical, Critical World

2007-11-19T21:50:00.000-05:00

[This is the final installment of my follow-up emails I've sent to parents of the 3rd to 6th graders in my Wednesday night class. We just finished a 6-week module on prayer.]

Vocatus atque non vocatus, dues aderit.

“Bidden or unbidden, God is present” – Erasmus

“The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Job 1:21b

Friends,

I am once again a few days late in composing and sending this email, but I think that it’s alright, since this entire week should flow well into last week’s lesson. On Wednesday, we concluded our six-week prayer module by discussing prayers of thanksgiving. (We’ll start a new module a week from Wednesday.) What a timely way to end our consideration of some of the different ways to imagine and practice prayer.

When things are at there best in my life, when I am the most spiritually nourished and the most in tune with myself, others, and God, I am practicing the spiritual disciplines, following a ‘rule of life’ that guides my training as an apprentice of Jesus and opens my life to the Spirit’s transformative presence. As a part of that rule, I try to intentionally cultivate the spirit of gratitude and thanksgiving in my life by: taking at least two minutes a day to pause to offer thanksgiving to God for blessings great and small, mundane and extraordinary; providing spiritual encouragement for another person each week; and providing a word of encouragement to someone daily.

I will be the first to admit that this is not an easy quality to cultivate. In fact, it’s time for confession. I have been struggling with a mini-depression over the past few months because the thanksgiving and encouragement have slipped out of my regular habit of disciplines! As I’ve been reflecting on my life and my spiritual health over the past week, I’ve realized that part of my current struggles are due to my inability to recognize God’s presence at all times, my inability to cultivate thankfulness and gratitude in all things.

Let’s be honest. It seems that most everything in our society conspires against that practice: television shows, commercials, billboards, water-cooler conversations at work, and dinner conversations at church small groups. It is difficult to navigate this labyrinth of ingratitude and find ourselves centered in thankfulness. A loss of thankfulness and gratitude plagues our lives and our families, and it has taken a destructive toll our churches, not to mention society at large. I can easily imagine reinterpreting Jesus’ parable about the soils in Mark 4 so that it speaks to the struggle of growing and sustaining seeds of thankfulness in our world today:

“The sower is the Spirit of God, tossing the seeds of thankfulness onto the hearts of God’s children. The seed that falls on the path are trampled underfoot by ingratitude and eaten by the birds of the comparison and critique. The seed that falls on the rocky ground struggles to find nourishing Living Water. The soil is shallow with no depth, and so are its roots. It sprouts quickly and looks promising, but then the sun of sarcasm and cynicism rises from the east. Its scorching heat bears down on the struggling sprout, and it quickly withers away to nothing. Other seed falls among the thorns of consumerism. For a short time sprout and the thorny weeds grow together and coexist. But in short time the thorns of discontent grew up, overtaking the seedlings of thankfulness, as the thorns of the cares of the world, the lure of wealth, the feelings of entitlement, and the insatiable desire for the latest and greatest toys and televisions, gadgets and golf clubs, cars and computers choke all life out of thankfulness. (There’s a good reason that the Friday after Thanksgiving Thursday has been affectionately dubbed “Black Friday”!) The good, fertile soil is constantly tended and watered and nurtured and weeded to protect the delicate seed, to curb critical tendencies, to treasure and value people as gifts, and to receive every experience and every thing as a gift rather an entitlement, a blessing rather than a right. The seeds of thankfulness take root there and grow into a living and active presence of God in all moments, experiences, and things. They blossom into a beautiful harvest in the midst of a bleak and barren world.”

The thankful heart requires constant nurture and cultivation, yet it carries with it an incredibly transformative potential. The potential is because gratitude helps us to realize and recognize that God is present. Thankfulness is rooted in the reality that “bidden or unbidden, God is present.” Adele Calhoun was correct when she wrote that “thankfulness is a thread that can bind together all the patchwork squares of our lives. Difficult times, happy days seasons of sickness, hours of bliss—all can be sewn together into something lovely with the thread of thankfulness.” If there is anything that our children, and all of us for that matter, need to remember, it’s that thanksgiving is possible because God is present, not because everything goes perfectly or the way that we would like or envision or imagine.

Take some time today to reflect on your own life. Where do you need to grow in thankfulness? Spend time reflecting on these questions from Calhoun’s Spiritual Disciplines Handbook: Practices That Transform Us:

How are you addicted to criticism, analysis and negativity? How might thankfulness be an antidote to a critical spirit?
When have you found that in retrospect you could have been thankful for something that you were not grateful for at the time it was happening? How can this perspective inform your life now?
How has a grateful person affected your own vision of what matters in life? How has someone who lives out of bitterness affected your life?
How does your disposition influence your attitude toward gratitude?

Prayers of gratitude and thankfulness have the power and potential to bring healing to our churches, to bring hope to shattered relationships, to resurrect struggling marriages, and to bring new creation to our own dead and lifeless souls. It is a cure for cynicism, salve for sarcasm, a balm for our discouragement. It has the power to liberate us from the suspicion that holds us captive and to bring us to the Promised Land of joyful life in the Spirit of God. (Can’t you just imagine the incredible ways that thankfulness can help cultivate the Fruit of the Spirit in our lives!)

This week, in the midst of feasting on turkey and pumpkin pie, watching football, succumbing to the powers of tryptophan and serotonin, take some time to practice the discipline of thankfulness. Give some thanks on Thanksgiving! Try to practice one or more of the following spiritual exercises alone or together with your family this “turkey day.” (These have been modified and adapted from Calhoun.)

Develop a family thanksgiving journal. Spend time together listing and recording the incredible gifts of God that have come to you this past year in the form of people, experiences, blessings, struggles, challenges, successes, and failures. (Or create a scrapbook with photos and pictures. Write short prayers of thanksgiving next to each one.) Spend some time thinking and talking about how these things have changed you and what it means that God has been present in all of them.
Read Psalm 136 together as a family. Choose one person to read the first half of each verse and then have everyone respond together: “His steadfast love endures for ever!” Continue with your own litany of praise, inviting everyone in the family to call out something for which they are thankful. After each one, everyone in the group should respond, “His steadfast love endures forever!”
Write a letter of thanks to someone who has touched your life in the past year, the past month, and the past. If you do this together as a family, take time to prayer for each person, thanking God for each person by name and thanking God for being present in your lives through each of those people.
What sorts of things tend to encourage you in thankfulness? Praise songs? Worship? Prayer? Time spent with friends? Time alone in solitude and reflection? Giving and receiving presents? Helping the poor or disenfranchised? What tends to discourage you or make thankfulness more difficult? When do you sense comparison, sarcasm, cynicism, and discontentment taking root in your soul? Plan ways to incorporate the things that encourage thankfulness into your life on a regular basis. Try to find ways to remove the things that are an impediment to having thankful heart.
Hold a thank-you party. Invite the people you want to honor with a thank you. Create and send out personalized invitations and spend the time celebrating and honoring them. (It might be a little uncomfortable for them at the time, but I think that they’ll leave being incredibly blessed and encouraged!)
Notice your tendency to make comparisons that result in feelings of dissatisfaction or entitlement. Practice abstaining from comparative statements about what you don’t have. Instead give thanks for what you do have.

Whatever else you may do this week, take advantage of the chance to give thanks! Help cultivate a spirit of thanksgiving in your children. May God help us all as we grow in thankfulness.