I’m violating my Lenten discipline. Don’t tell Jesus.
My wife showed me this video last night and I couldn’t not share it.
As one who was bullied endlessly, I would like to say that this video hits too close to home… except that it hits just close enough.
The poem is To This Day by Shane Koyczan
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltun92DfnPY&sns=em%5D
Hidden in the annals of Christian history are stories we’d rather not tell.
The Church of Christ has not always done well at emulating the life and love of its Lord and Savior. As a matter of fact, we’ve been downright evil for much of the time. One need only mention the Crusades or the Salem Witch Trials to get an idea of what I’m talking about. One such example comes from the very roots of our own Presbyterian tradition:
Back in the 1500s, when John Calvin was preaching in the Swiss city of Geneva, a guy named Michael Servetus blew into town. He was on the run from the Catholic Church after being arrested for heresy and then breaking out of prison. Servetus was a Unitarian, meaning that he did not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity: the belief in one God, consisting of three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The fugitive Servetus made a bad choice in putting Geneva on his travel itinerary. John Calvin, whose opinions had a powerful influence on city politics, had no more love for Servetus than the Catholic authorities had. Calvin himself had previously written to a friend, “If [Servetus] comes here… I will never permit him to depart alive.” And Calvin made good on his threat. As soon as someone recognized Servetus attending worship at Calvin’s church, he was arrested, tried, and burned at the stake for heresy. Michael Servetus’ last recorded words were, “Jesus, Son of the Eternal God, have mercy on me.”
This is part of the dark side of Presbyterian history. John Calvin is still remembered as the founder of the Reformed Tradition, of which the Presbyterian Church is a part. In 1903, Calvin’s spiritual heirs in the city of Geneva erected a monument to the memory of Michael Servetus on the spot where he was burned. The inscription on that monument condemns Calvin’s error and acknowledges that the true spirit of the Reformation can only exist where liberty of conscience is allowed to flourish.
It’s too little, too late for Servetus, but the gesture acknowledges that we’ve at least made a little progress in half a millennium.
In so many of these cases of heresy trials and stake burnings, there is an oft-repeated label that has been misappropriated from the New Testament and applied to the opponents of established orthodoxy. That label is: “Enemies of the cross of Christ”.
You might have noticed that very phrase appearing in this morning’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Paul wrote, “[M]any live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things.”
And just who are these “enemies”? Paul is not clear on that. At various points in church history, this term has been applied to Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Pagans, Unitarians, and basically anyone else who’s theological views differ from the person applying the label at the time. “Enemies of the cross of Christ” is a derogatory epithet used to identify others as “outsiders” and “heretics”. Most of the time, it has been applied to emphasize doctrinal differences between religious groups.
I believe that such use of this phrase does violence to its original meaning in Paul’s letter to the Philippians. You see, in that letter, Paul never suggests that one’s religious affiliation or theological orientation are determinant of one’s status as an enemy of the cross of Christ. For Paul, the truth goes much deeper than that: so deep, I would say, that the essence of this message can be found in the spiritual teachings of every mystic and every sage in every culture, every place, and every period of history. Paul’s message of the cross is the story of people graduating from their small, self-centered lives to the larger, reality-centered Life. Some have called it conversion, some salvation, some liberation, and some enlightenment. For Paul, as for most Christians, the central symbol for this process of transformation is the cross of Christ.
The cross is the single most recognizable Christian symbol in the world. Historically speaking, it was of course the instrument of torture and execution on which Jesus was killed. Symbolically speaking, Christians have attached multiple levels of meaning to its significance. Starting about a thousand years ago, a full millennium after Jesus was born, a British writer named Anselm of Canterbury came up with the idea that theologians now call “substitutionary atonement”. You might not have heard that phrase before, but you probably have heard some preacher on the radio or television saying, “Jesus died for your sins.” Substitutionary atonement is currently the most commonly known and accepted interpretation of the significance of the Jesus’ crucifixion, but the idea is only about half as old as Christianity itself.
In his letter to the Philippians, Paul presents an entirely different understanding of the cross. For Paul, the crucifixion event cannot be understood apart from the story of Christ’s resurrection. According to Paul, these two events form a unified whole. Neither one makes any sense without the other.
The crucifixion and resurrection, taken together, form the central image of the Christian spiritual journey. In the process of transitioning from a self-centered to a reality-centered life, every Christian must undergo a kind of death and resurrection. As Paul himself wrote elsewhere, in his letter to the Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” Earlier in his letter to the Philippians, he writes in a similar vein:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
In this early Christian hymn, Paul lays out the path of self-emptying, the path of the cross, which leads to resurrection and exaltation by God. And this, he says, is not only the journey of Jesus himself, but also of every Christian who claims to bear his name. Paul begins his hymn with the exhortation: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus”.
A Christian then, in Paul’s eyes, is one who walks the path of the cross, who dies to the old, self-centered life and rises to the new, reality-centered Life. One could say that a Christian is a “friend of the cross of Christ”.
By contrast, those who are “enemies of the cross of Christ” are those who refuse to walk this path of metaphorical crucifixion and resurrection. The Buddha might call them “unenlightened”. Muhammad might call them “infidels”. Harry Potter would probably call them “muggles”.
What can we learn about these “enemies of the cross of Christ”? Well, since this status has more to do with one’s way of life than with one’s religious affiliation, I think we can say that they might belong to any tradition or no tradition at all. We’re just as likely to find them in pews as in bars.
Here’s what Paul has to say about them: “Their end is destruction; their god is the belly”. This is an interesting way of putting it. When Paul says, “their god is the belly” he obviously doesn’t mean their physical abdomens. The belly is where one’s food goes after it is consumed. The belly, in this sense, is the seat of desire. The people who refuse to let go of their small, self-centered lives are worshiping their own desires and addictions. What they want/need is most important to them.
For them, the primary concern is “my food, my money, my country, my church.” Everything is all about I, me, my. There is no big picture or larger context in which they see their lives. That which benefits them is universally good. That which hinders them is universally bad. In every story, these folks never fail to cast themselves as either the heroes or the victims. They’re always on the side of right. They have all the answers. Anyone who disagrees with them is a heretic who deserves to be burned at the stake. This is what self-centered worship looks like. These folks are what Paul refers to as “enemies of the cross of Christ.” There is no self-sacrifice for them. There is no denial of desire for the greater good. There is no responsibility beyond one’s responsibility to one’s own self. Self-centered existence.
What is the end result of this way of life? Paul says it quite clearly: “Their end is destruction”. This self-centered way of thinking and living can only lead to pain and death. This is not some mysterious, mystical idea. Think about it: what kind of world would this be if neighbors never went out of their way to help each other? What if friends and family never forgave each other? What if no one answered the call of charity or the obligation of justice for those who suffer? I don’t know about you, but that’s not a world I would want to live in. That selfish mentality can only lead to destruction, as Paul warns us.
The way of the cross is the way of sacrifice. Jesus could have called upon his mass of followers to rise up and fight if he so desired. Instead, he chose to walk the path of nonviolence. He chose to suffer pain, rather than cause it. He chose to die, rather than kill to protect what was rightfully his. In so doing, Jesus set himself apart from every other revolutionary movement leader of his time. His selfless sacrifice did not go unnoticed or unremembered. He left his followers with a symbol and an image that would change the way they look at the world.
Christ’s willing submission to crucifixion, according to Paul, is the basis for his sovereignty over all creation. For his followers, it is the model we follow for living our lives in the world. The end-result of crucifixion is not death, but resurrection. “Humiliation”, according to Paul, is transformed into “glory”. Followers of the way of Christ must befriend the cross because it is the only way into the “abundant life” that Jesus intended for us to have.
Paul’s warning about the “enemies of the cross of Christ” is not a wholesale condemnation of those who hold different theological views from Paul’s, or John Calvin’s, or mine. Paul’s warning applies to all of us, no matter what religion we espouse. With tears, Paul is pleading with us to realize that our little lives, ruled by our own selfish desires and preferences, lead only to destruction.
The flip side of Paul’s warning is that those who befriend the cross, who walk the path of self-sacrifice for the greater good, like Jesus did, are sure to receive resurrection, salvation, and enlightenment. These are the true saints, the blessed ones who discover the meaning of life. These are the real Christians: the friends of the cross of Christ.
May it be so for you, for me, and for all who seek the greater good, the life abundant, in the name (or the spirit) of Jesus Christ.
We’re going to talk about temptation today.
Whenever I say that word, a part of me wants to say it like an old-timey southern gospel preacher: Temp-TAY-shun!
I could tell you stories…
I’ve been to southern revivals, after all.
I could go on about the wrath of God and the fires of hell for those who give in to temptation. But I’m going to that to you. I sat through enough of those sermons as a teenager to know that they don’t really work. Those hellfire-and-brimstone sermons didn’t really make me and my friends into better Christians or better human beings.
In fact, they didn’t even help us to resist temptation. All they did was scare us into thinking that God was an angry judge up in the sky who wants to throw people into hell for eternity.
Scientists have done studies on the effectiveness of those kinds of scare tactics for changing patterns of human behavior. What they found out is that, while fear and guilt do yield some short-term results, they lack the power to effect long-term change in the way people live. In order to do that, people need positive, stable communities where they know they will be accepted and encouraged to pursue worthy goals and common values. Furthermore, they need to have a sense of meaning and purpose in their connection to the larger community. Give people this and they will be more likely to develop healthy patterns of behavior that enable them to resist temptation.
So, you’re not going to get any fire and brimstone from me this morning. That’s not what this church is about, anyway. But we are going to talk about temptation. We’re going to talk about it in a way that gets us away from the blame and shame game.
In order to do this, I’m going to use two, very common, almost stereotypical examples of the kinds of temptation that plague men and women in this society.
For men, the stereotypical temptation and potential source of shame has to do with sex. The message we men receive is that we are animalistic Neanderthals who think of nothing but sex all day. We hear messages like this: “You’re looking at that person?! How could you?! Don’t you love me?! You men are all such filthy pigs! You couldn’t keep your one-track minds out of the gutter if your lives depended on it!” Sound familiar, guys? Ladies, I want to let you in on a little secret this morning: you’re not the only ones saying these things to us. We say it to ourselves. We live in a society that trains us to be simultaneously obsessed with and ashamed of our sex drives. With that kind of split thinking, even the best of us are bound to get confused on occasion. What’s worse is that this same society has also trained us to think that real men don’t talk about their feelings (especially with each other), so we end up thinking that we have to bear the burden of this confusion alone, lest we admit it and look like wimps to our fellow men and perverts to the women in our lives (who have themselves been trained by society to believe that women aren’t supposed think about sex, which is also not true). So, you can plainly see: there is a lot of shame and confusion going around about men and sex.
Now, let’s talk about women for a minute. Think about this: you’re at Applebee’s and a commercial comes on with some bikini model selling Budweiser, and every heterosexual male head in the restaurant is turning toward the TV. Now imagine this: the person sitting next to you at your table orders that double-sized piece of chocolate cake with the warm fudge topping flowing like lava down the slopes of a sweet, delicious volcano… am I provoking some kind of reaction with this mental image? How about this one: you come home after a long, bad day at work. Your significant other is away for the night, so you’re exhausted, on your own, and you happen to know that there is a mostly full container of rocky road ice cream in the freezer… do you see where I’m going with this? Be honest: are you even going to bother getting a bowl or is that spoon going right into the carton? I think you see my point: For women, the stereotypical temptation and source of shame has to do with food.
From an outsider’s perspective, this temptation might seem more benign or acceptable than sexual temptation. After all, when was the last time you heard about a politician being impeached over a bucket of fried chicken? But then there’s the pressure that society puts on women to conform to a particular body type. Even if you have the most loving and supportive spouse or parents in the world, they cannot drown out the screaming chorus of voices shaming you because of the way you look. And you’re told that it’s all because of your desire for food. What most men don’t understand is that this critical voice, when it comes from inside your own head, gets you saying things to yourself like: “I’m disgusting! What a pig! I can’t believe I just ate that. I’m going to look like beached whale!” The men who love you would never let another person talk to you that way, but we don’t get that the voice of shame in your head talks to you that way on a daily basis. And even though indulgence in food is more socially acceptable than indulgence in sex, the struggle between temptation and shame is just as real and just as damaging in its own way.
What I’d like to do today is explore some ways for dealing effectively with temptation that don’t involve launching people into these shame spirals that never lead anywhere positive. And I’d like to do that by looking at Jesus’ struggle with temptation in Luke 4.
The story opens just after Jesus is baptized in the Jordan River. During that ritual, Jesus has a vision of a dove landing on him and a voice from heaven telling him, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” The truth of who he is as the Son of God has just hit home with him. He needs to process this new information, so he heads out, away from civilization, to fast and pray in the desert.
While he’s out there, he is tested by the devil, who tempts him to misuse the gift he’s been given. The devil tempts Jesus to do three things: to turn stones in to bread, to bow down and worship him, and to throw himself from the top of the temple.
Some movies portray this scene in a very dramatic fashion. The devil is portrayed as a talking snake or a man in a business suit with slicked back hair who wants to make a deal with Jesus. Personally, I like to imagine Jesus hearing that voice as if it was coming from inside his own head.
It seems that Jesus was wrestling with his own sense of identity and purpose. In light of what he had just seen and heard at his baptism, Jesus had to work out for himself what it all meant. Should he use his status as God’s Son to offer quick fixes to the world’s problems, like ending global hunger? Should he opt for the way of power over the way of suffering? Should he make a spectacle of himself to gather followers and build a movement powerful enough to challenge the Roman Empire? In the end, Jesus said no to all of the above. Those ideas weren’t consistent with who he was and what he was meant to do in life. He came back from his time in the wilderness with a much deeper level of self-understanding and self-acceptance.
I think this story has some important implications for us as well. I think it gives us a paradigm for dealing with temptation in ways that don’t buy in to that old shame and blame game. Like Jesus, we too are on a journey to understand ourselves as beloved children of God. Those parts of ourselves that we wrestle with are divinely-given parts of who we are. We don’t need to despise them as dirty in order to keep them from throwing our lives out of balance.
We can even look at those parts of our lives from a more scientifically informed perspective that, if properly understood, can help us understand and accept ourselves better.
Let’s look at the sex-drive again. We already covered the confusion and shame that surrounds this subject for most men. We think of ourselves as bad or dirty because we have these impulses we can’t shake.
But let’s think for a minute about the purposes those impulses served for our ancestors. The first is obvious: making sure that our genes are passed on to future generations. But that’s not all. Sex is also a social bonding ritual. We feel instinctively drawn toward one another in ways that go far beyond mere reproduction. We form families to pool our skills and resources. This capacity gave our ancestors the advantage they needed to survive in a world full of predators that were faster and stronger than them. Without that basic attraction toward each other, our species never would have survived. Sexual desire was the first impulse that made family and civilization possible. It’s a good thing. We need it. Human society wouldn’t be here without it. We should seek to understand and honor its presence within us before we pass judgment on it.
Let’s look at our impulse for food as well.
(By the way, I’m borrowing most of what I’m about to say from Michael Dowd’s book Thank God for Evolution, which our Monday night Vespers group is currently studying.)
The three so-called “bad” foods that we tend to crave most often are sugars, fats, and salts. Whenever we get the urge to indulge our palette, it’s usually an urge for foods in one or more of the above categories. Have you ever wondered why we so many cravings for those particular flavors?
Well, as it turns out, sugars, fats, and salts were pretty hard to come by in prehistoric times. Our foraging ancestors had to eat all they could find in order to stay alive in the jungle. Their craving for these foods gave them an evolutionary advantage over others. The folks who ate more sugars, fats, and salts were more likely to stay alive and healthy for their next meal. When we feel those cravings within us, we’re tapping into a part of our biology that has a noble and triumphant heritage. Our very existence is proof that our ancestors did well in eating all the sugars, fats, and salts they could get their hands on. We should be grateful for those cravings before we pass judgment on them.
So, those are the evolutionary explanations for our sex drive and food cravings. They are a part of who we are as human beings. We wouldn’t even be here without them. We should honor their presence and function in our lives. We should call them good because that’s exactly what they are.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s always a good thing to indulge such impulses. Sugars, fats, and salts were rare for our ancestors in the jungle, but we’re surrounded by them in our current setting. Likewise, acting on every sexual impulse is more likely to break up a family than build one. We shouldn’t forget that nature gave us brains as well and expects us to use them for making good decisions. Accepting yourself and understanding yourself do not necessarily mean indulging yourself.
What self-acceptance and self-understanding do mean is that we can finally give ourselves permission to call a time-out on the blame and shame game. Just like Jesus did in the desert, you and I are coming to grips with who we really are. Our desires are part of that. Temptation is really just one of our natural survival instincts acting out of context and out of proportion. That, hopefully, is where our higher-level brains can kick in and override the software that would otherwise lead us to unfavorable consequences.
There’s no need to be ashamed. There’s no need to beat yourself up. Simply say Thank You to your temptations and honor the place those impulses hold in our species’ evolutionary past.
“God don’t make no junk.” That includes you and every natural thing about you. It’s all good. It’s all sacred. It’s all blessed. Remember that the next time you’re facing temptation, and maybe you too will hear that voice from heaven, saying to you, “You are my Son/Daughter, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
Dear Superfriends and Blogofans:
The past twelve months have been amazing for me on this blog. I’ve had two separate posts go semi-viral and catch the attention of some of the biggest movers and shakers in my denomination. Many of you have emailed me (and a few have even called) with encouraging words about what this blog means to you. Your words have kept me writing when I otherwise wanted to quit. Thank you.
I’ve come to see what I do here as part of my larger ministry in the world, no less significant than what I do from the pulpit on Sunday or in my classroom during the week. I have been especially touched by the messages left by those who self-identify as exiled or de-churched Christians. I hope that my presence in your life via this blog is part of your healing from the wounds of the past.
As social media occupy an increasingly central place in my life, I think it is imperative that I learn how to integrate them into my life in a harmonious and holistic way. Many others have voiced concerns about the effect that these media are having on our ability to communicate with one another. Our technology has outpaced our ethics. We need to occasionally step back and take stock of where it is that technology has brought us, how it is that we got here, and what it is that we want to do next.
I have noticed this technological imbalance in my own life. Whether I am at work or play, I spend most of my time in front of TV and computer screens. Things that need doing sometimes don’t get done because there’s just “one more thing” I want to watch or do online.
The liturgical season of Lent is, for me, a time for self-reflection and restoring the balance of life. During these next 40 days, I’ve decided to unplug from electronic entertainment and social media. I’ll be updating my blog with my weekly sermons and checking Facebook on Sundays (which don’t count as part of Lent). I’m also allowing myself to watch one half-hour TV show on Sundays because I don’t want to fall too far behind on the final season of The Office.
Other than that, you can find me reading a book, tuning my guitar, playing with my kids, and (believe it or not) cleaning my house. I hope to use this time to reflect on my relationship with technology and social media. I hope to return with a greater sense of clarity about what this technology is for and how it is that I wish to conduct myself in its virtual environment.
I’m not going totally off-grid, though: I’ll be checking email for professional purposes and answering the phone. If you need to talk to me for personal reasons, feel free to give me a call! I get the sense that I’ll be craving conversation.
I’ll see you again at Easter when this blog kicks back into action! Until then, make sure to check in weekly to read the sermons!
As always:
Be blessed and be a blessing.
Barrett
Believe it or not (and I know many of you won’t), I sometimes like to show up to work early. With two kids at home, those few minutes in the car are sometimes the only quiet moments I get to myself in a day.
It just so happens that last Wednesday was one of those days and, before I went into my office, I took a minute to sit in my car and watch the snow falling on my windshield. I thought about what was actually happening as each individual flake fell and melted into a droplet of water: The hardened, crystal structure of the ice was absorbing the heat radiation coming from inside my car. It was literally a transfer of energy that was making those water molecules more flexible as a liquid. Obviously, a liquid is more flexible than a solid crystal. A crystal can only break, but a liquid can bend into any shape necessary. If that energy transfer process continued, the liquid would eventually get hot enough to turn into a gas and the water vapor would simply become part of the air itself.
What struck me is that this process is an almost perfect metaphor for what happens to human beings as we grow spiritually. We begin as small, hardened, selfish crystals. We exist as solid individuals, obsessed with the uniqueness of our own crystalline structure. This is what we could call “the ego-centric life”. This is the state of being that says things like: “You’ve got to look out for number one; it’s a dog-eat-dog world; and it’s my way or the highway.”
But something happens to us as we grow older and begin to ask the “bigger questions” in life. We start to think outside the box. We meet good, decent people with political and religious worldviews different from our own. Spiritual disciplines like prayer and meditation lead us toward compassion and understanding. We humans, like snowflakes melting on a windshield, become more fluid and flexible.
I would not hesitate to say that our souls gradually absorb the divine energy of the Holy Spirit and we begin to look and act more like Jesus.
If this process were to continue, I would venture a guess that our individual egos would eventually evaporate into the atmosphere of love itself, which is God. Whether this final transformation can happen in this life or only in the next, I’m not sure, but the image is compelling.
It actually reminded me of the Transfiguration, which is the event in the life of Jesus that we traditionally recall on this last Sunday before the beginning of Lent. In this story, Jesus and his closest disciples walk up a mountain to pray and, while they are up there, Jesus begins to glow with a kind of inner, divine light.
This is not the only time something like that happens in the Bible. In the book of Exodus, Moses goes up a mountain to commune with God and comes back down with his face glowing so brightly that his fellow Israelites can’t even stand to look at it.
In his second letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul refers to this Moses story and extends the idea of “spiritual radiation” to all people who seek a deeper closeness with the Divine. Using the term “glory” to describe this “spiritual radiation”, Paul writes: “all of us, …seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another”.
Along with Christians throughout history, Paul believed that Christ revealed the fullness of divine glory to the world. As people remembered Jesus’ life, studied his teachings, and celebrated his death and resurrection, Paul believed that their lives would begin to resemble Christ’s more and more. The divine glory (i.e. “spiritual radiation”) that shone in him would gradually become visible in us.
To put it another way: we become what we behold. The more we look at Jesus, the more we look like Jesus.
Now, Paul had no way of knowing this, but he was actually picking up on insights that would one day be confirmed by scientists in the 21st century.
Dr. Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has described a phenomenon called neuroplasticity. What this means is: “The more you focus on something — whether that’s math or auto racing or football or God — the more that becomes your reality, the more it becomes written into the neural connections of your brain,” according to Dr. Newberg.
Dr. Newberg has spent much of his career studying the effects of prayer and meditation through the lens of neuroplasticity. He has discovered that these practices actually have a concrete, measurable effect on the way your brain functions. The more you focus on God, the more real God becomes to you.
Most of Newberg’s research has used subjects who pray or meditate for several hours a day, such as monks and nuns. But there is nothing in his research to suggest that we “ordinary folks” can’t also derive some benefit from a regular spiritual practice, even though we might only have a few minutes each day to engage in such exercises.
Like Paul, Moses, and Jesus, we too can become what we behold. As the apostle Paul said, we can “[see] the glory of the Lord” and “[be] transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” The divine light that shone through Jesus and Moses can shine through us too, in a metaphorical sense.
When I see photos of the people I most admire in recent history: Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa, Gene Robinson, and Oscar Romero, I see faces radiant with the glory of God. I see people who have spent so much time looking at Jesus that they have started to look like Jesus.
So then, how is this process of transformation “from one degree of glory to another” available to us? The simple answer is that this process just happens within us naturally as we spend more and more time and energy cultivating our conscious awareness of God’s presence. Now, that’s a pretty abstract idea, so let me bring it down to earth: in practical terms, I think there is a lot of wisdom to be gained from those good old fashioned spiritual disciplines of Bible study and prayer.
Bible study should be a no-brainer. We can learn how to follow Jesus by reading about his life and studying his teachings. If you’ve never read the Bible on your own before, I recommend starting with one of the four gospels, like Mark or Luke. Read just a little bit every day and think about what you’re reading. Try to imagine yourself as a character in the story. Watch for any words or ideas that seem to “stand out” to you. Use your imagination. Ask yourself, “Why did this word stand out to me, in this way, at this time?”
Daily prayer is another good practice to have as well. If you’ve never prayed before, here’s a simple method for getting started: start by naming things you’re thankful for. Even if you can’t think of anything in particular, be thankful that you woke up today, thankful that the sun is shining, thankful for the air in your lungs or the food on your plate. As you go along, you might start to think of other, more specific things in your life. Next, name those people or situations you’re concerned about. You can be as general or specific as you like. Some people like to keep a list of the names of people they’re praying for. You can even pray for yourself. It’s not selfish. God knows you have needs. Disclaimer: Praying for a situation doesn’t guarantee that things will always go your way, but it does mean that you are beginning to look at yourself, your needs, your life, and your world through a different set of eyes: spiritual eyes. I once heard someone say: “Prayer changes you before it changes your circumstances.”
After you have given thanks and prayed for yourself and others, just sit for a while in silence. Be still. Close your eyes. Focus your attention on the rhythm of your breathing. This kind of wordless prayer is often called meditation or contemplative prayer. Stay with it for as long as you can, several minutes even. Personally, I like to do about twenty minutes of silent meditation per day. If that sounds overwhelming to you, try starting with just five minutes. This kind of prayer is often the most powerful of all.
Finally, I like to close my prayer time with something familiar, like the Lord’s Prayer. We say it once a week here in church, but saying it daily can help the words to sink deep down into your bones. The rhythm of the words by themselves can sometimes put you in a prayerful or spiritually attentive state of mind.
These exercises of prayer and Bible study are the two best resources I have found for helping us, as Christians, to re-center our lives on the presence of God. The more we lean on these practices, the more our lives will reflect the glory of God. As I said before: the more we look at Jesus, the more we look like Jesus. We become what we behold.
We will be like those snowflakes, falling onto the windshield of a warm car. The heat from inside the car will radiate into us, making us less cold & rigid and more warm & fluid. We’ll be able to bend, flex, and go with the flow. We’ll run together, like water droplets do. The divisions between us will become less visible. Given time near this heat source, we might even begin to evaporate and become part of the air itself: the atmosphere of God in which we live, move, and have our being.
Reblogged from Joey Reed, a United Methodist pastor in Tennessee.
No more just “growing the church”… Unless you mean something different when you say, “Grow, Church.”
Click here to read the full article
He talks about tossing the concept of “church growth” into the garbage (where it belongs). In its place, he advocates placing “Growing in Grace”, “Growing in Love”, and “Growing in Depth”. These things, Reed says, will make for a growing church.
I’ve had similar thoughts of my own in the past:
A Growing Church is a Dying Church
Needless to say, for those who have read my stuff before, I’m right there with you, Rev. Reed!
Have you been listening to reports and reading articles about the Debt Limit and the Fiscal Cliff without understanding what it is?
Here you go and you’re welcome:
[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KIbkoop4AYE]
This is a reblog from ecclesio.com
It’s a reflection written by a pastor in my denomination who I have come to deeply respect. On two very public occasions, she went beyond the letter of the law in order to incarnate the spirit behind it:
Tara has earned my admiration.
This is her story in her own words:
Here is the rub and the theological bankruptcy I feel I am “pastoring” in. I am not permitted to order worship and celebrate the love of God in the covenant of marriage for the same folk whom I have baptized, confirmed, served communion, and even ordained as pastors. There is a gross error in how we as pastors and congregations are then honoring the whole child of God whom we have started with in baptism.
I’d like to tell you a story I heard several years ago about a church in crisis. They were a relatively small church in a large, cosmopolitan city. They were a young church, having only been planted a few years before, but had been around long enough to enter their second generation of leadership as their founding pastor moved on to another call and was succeeded by a popular, charismatic preacher. The members of this church came from all across the ethnic and socioeconomic spectrum. From the perspective of church growth marketing analysts, this place was set to be a gold mine! They had everything: a prime location in a major urban center, a diverse membership, and a popular, dynamic preacher. What could go wrong? Well, as it turns out, there was a lot that could go wrong… and it did.
Now, my first thought would be: It must have been the pastor. What did he do wrong? He must have become embroiled in some kind of public scandal involving money or sex. That’s all you really hear about from ministers in the media these days. But no, it wasn’t the pastor. In fact, their charismatic clergyman hardly shows up in this story at all.
In spite of everything they had going for them on paper, this church was struggling in reality. In fact, things were going so badly, this church’s founding denomination was thinking about pulling the plug on the entire operation.
The reality was that this church was tearing itself apart from the inside out. What started out as groups of like-minded friends had become rival factions in an all-out war for power and control of the church. Their pious posturing was a thin veil over blatant hypocrisy. This ongoing dispute between cliques became so all-consuming that the real problems facing the church couldn’t be addressed.
Newer members of the church were struggling with various spiritual and theological questions, but there was no one to help them search for answers.
Wealthy members of the congregation, primarily concerned with keeping up appearances, would intentionally schedule church suppers during times when they knew that the poorer congregants would still be at work. By the time the latter group arrived at the suppers, there was often no food left for them.
At one point, it became publicly known that a prominent member of the church was tangled up in a scandalous affair (with his own stepmother, no less), but so much energy was being spent on dealing with the rival factions that the affair went unaddressed and this family was unable to receive the kind of attention and pastoral care they so desperately needed.
Outsiders and other church leaders were aghast when they heard about how bad things had become. Some wondered whether this sorry mess of humanity could even be called a church anymore. They were beginning to think that closing the church might even be the most compassionate option.
Instead of closing it down, the denomination decided to send in another pastor to help. As it turned out the pastor they sent was the church’s founding pastor, who had left for another call some years before. He had several insights to help them deal with their various crises, but the best thing he did for them was trace all their little problems back to a single big problem: Love, or the lack thereof. The main problem was that these people just hated each other.
It was their mutual hatred for each other that consumed the members of this church from the inside out. They couldn’t function as a church. There was nothing anyone could do to fix that problem. They had everything going for them: a great urban location, a dynamic super-pastor, and several wealthy financial supporters with deep pockets, but none of those things could make the church grow or stop it from dying if the members didn’t embody that single most important core value: Love.
None of it meant anything without Love.
Now, I want to pause for a moment and pull the curtain back on this church that I’ve been talking about. I haven’t told you the church’s name or who the pastor was. It’s not a church in our area or our denomination. In fact, it’s not even a church that exists in our century. The church I’ve been talking about is the first century Christian church in the Greek city of Corinth, founded by the apostle Paul himself. He was that founding pastor who returned to help his former congregation in crisis.
The letter of advice he wrote to them is what we now call the book of 1 Corinthians in the New Testament of the Bible. The most famous part of that letter is the section we read this morning: the Hymn to Love in 1 Corinthians 13. This passage is most often read at weddings, where everyone looks great, music is playing, and love is in the air. Most of us probably heard those words this morning and let them breeze right past us because they are so familiar and so associated with saccharine euphoria that we miss their real meaning completely.
These words, when lived in reality, are radical and revolutionary. They have the power to transform the way we interact with one another and rescue the future for a community that most people have simply given up on. This beautiful love poetry was not written for a wedding. It doesn’t spring up from the same part of human experience that inspired Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. There is nothing sweet or saccharine about these words at all.
These words about love arose out of conflict within a church that was bitterly divided against itself. These words are Paul’s challenge to every rival clique’s claim to superiority over others. Listen to his words again. If you’ve heard them before, listen to their meaning for the first time:
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
Can you hear the urgency in Paul’s voice? He’s telling the Corinthians to stop acting like children and grow up. These little spats that their cliques are having over church power simply don’t matter. At all. All their theological knowledge, their faith, their pledge cards, and their volunteer service to the church are rendered meaningless if they don’t know how to love each other.
Love and love alone makes a church. And this love isn’t just some warm fuzzy feeling they get when they sing Amazing Grace or Kum Ba Yah. This isn’t some hippy flower fest; this is the church of Christ. In here, love only counts as real when it takes on flesh and blood in the actions of those who claim to possess it.
Love is patient. Are you patient? Love is kind. Are you kind? Love is not irritable or resentful. Are you? Love is not envious, boastful, arrogant, or rude. Are you any of those things? Love does not insist on its own way. How often do you insist on getting your own way in a church conflict?
Is this making you uncomfortable? It should be. What Paul is talking about here is nothing less than a complete reordering of our priorities. He’s not just trying to change the way we live, he’s trying to change the way we fight.
The Corinthian Christians had a rather skewed perspective on the fight that was tearing them apart. They all saw themselves as heroes defending a battleground (i.e. the church) from dangerous enemies (i.e. their rivals). In reality, they were not the heroes: they were the battleground. God was the hero defending them. And their so-called rivals? They were not the enemy. They were actually God’s allies in the fight for each other’s souls.
In truth, the Love that Paul wrote about was already present in each one of their hearts. They were members of the same body: the body of Christ. What was good for one was good for all. There was no point to the rivalry then, because they were trying to divide something that couldn’t be divided. The sooner they realized this truth, the sooner they would get over their petty little squabbles and get back to really being what a church should be: a community of people so full of love that it just naturally spilled over and into the surrounding community. That’s how you define a healthy, growing church. The pastor, the size, the building, and the budget are all completely secondary concerns. Our first job is always to embody the love of Christ within our own lives, amongst each other, and eventually flowing out into the larger community. When the people in this lonely world see that, they will be naturally attracted to it and will come from all over to see what it is that we have here.
What might that transition from hate to love look like?
It’s hard to say. “Love,” as Han Suyin said, “is a many splendoured thing.” Love looks different when it takes on flesh and blood in the lives of different people. I can tell you the stories of a couple of times in my life when I had to make that transition from hate to love.
Hate is a strong word, and I don’t use it lightly. But in these two cases, I can honestly say that I really, actually came to hate my enemy. The first was one of my seminary professors. The second was a co-worker at my first job after seminary. In both cases, I was the one in the right. My enemy had hurt and offended me with words and deeds that I found demeaning and humiliating. Time after time, I tried to reach out in friendship, but was repaid with cold indifference. Eventually, I stopped trying. I left them to their miserable little worlds and went on with my life.
But they didn’t leave me. Their hostile presence was still firmly lodged in my mind, even though we managed to avoid each other most of the time. I learned what it felt like to grow hard and bitter inside toward another human being. All of our public interactions were polite, but I seethed inwardly with a hot hatred I’d never felt before. Mutual acquaintances quickly learned to never mention their names in my presence because of the sharp reaction it would provoke in me. I had a problem: a problem with hatred. Jesus said that to hate another person is to murder that person in your heart. I get that now because I’ve felt it.
But the irony is that my enemies weren’t being hurt by my hatred, I was. That fire inside was burning me alive without ever touching them. My hate was keeping me from fully becoming the person I was meant to be. Even though I knew I was in the right, that knowledge gave me no relief from the bitterness. Something had to change.
I thought, at the time, that what I needed to do was forgive my enemies, just as Jesus had done to those who were crucifying him. I tried and I tried hard, over and over, again and again. I didn’t want to be a person who wallowed in hate. I kept telling myself, “I need to forgive him… I need to forgive him…” but I just couldn’t.
And then, one night, it hit me. I was standing on the balcony of my apartment in Vancouver, seething with more bitter thoughts about my enemy. I said to myself again, “I need to forgive him.” And then, it felt like I heard a voice whisper to me from the very back of my mind, “No you don’t. You need to ask forgiveness for yourself.” I believe now that what I heard was the voice of God, speaking wisdom to my heart.
The fact is that I was the one who had let my righteous indignation turn into bitterness, not my enemy who had hurt me. I was the one who had allowed hatred to change me into the kind of person I didn’t want to be. I had tarnished my enemy’s reputation with harsh words spoken behind the back. I wanted the whole world to know what he had done to me. I wanted him to pay. But the irony is that I was the one who was paying the price and reaping none of the benefits of vengeance. Beneath my anger, I was just as scared and hurt as ever.
After that initial insight on the balcony, I quickly realized what my next step needed to be: I had to face my enemy and ask him to forgive me. I had to let go and throw myself upon the mercy of the person I hated. It wasn’t fun, but it was the only remedy that could ease the searing pain in my heart.
When the deed was said and done, in both cases, relief came. I never became close friends with either of the men I previously hated, but the war was over. I found peace within myself. More importantly, I discovered that an internal blockage had been removed from my heart and I was able to love much more fully than before. I wasn’t just able to love my enemy more fully, I was able to love myself and world more fully as well. Love was taking on flesh and blood in me, transforming me into Love’s hands and feet in the world.
Asking my enemy to forgive me, even though I knew I was in the right, is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, but it was worth it.
I think that’s the truth that Paul was trying to get across to the Corinthian Christians, who were so divided and hateful toward their fellow church members. Paul wanted them to know that love is worth it because love is what lies at the center of reality. God is love. Therefore, our efforts to love one another are what make God’s loving presence more palpable to the rest of the world. That’s our mission, as Christians. That’s our church’s reason for existing. If we’re not doing that, then we’re not a church, no matter how nice our building, how big our budget, or how handsome our pastor is. Those things don’t make us church. Love makes us church.
That’s all I really want to tell you today: Love one another.
Because I love you, because God loves you, and because there’s nothing you can do about it.
Hopping Hadrian's Wall 