Serendipity on a Subway Platform

I had one of the more pleasant experiences of life the other day. Two friends and I were on a day trip to DC and were between trains on the DC Metro subway platform. It was around the end of the work day, so the platform was crowded with people leaving their jobs, heading home with hearts and minds full of the days activities, both their triumphs and struggles.

Over the dull murmur of muted subway platform conversation, I began to hear the echoes of a quartet. Maybe I picked up on it first because I sang in a quartet for 3 years in college, but it was unmistakable. Four African-American gentleman--all in their late 40's and early 50's--were standing in close proximity mixing tight harmony into the air of the day's burdens and blessings.
And they were good. Really, really good.

Without really thinking about it, the thought crossed my mind "I'll gladly pay a $1 for that kind of joy being added to my day." So I got out my wallet and walked to their begging basket and dropped in my dollar. I don't know if my physical token of appreciation was some sort of necessary catalyst, but something happened.

To say that the mood on the platform was transformed into something glorious and sublime is an understatement. A kind of gentleness and peace swept the place. Body tensions relaxed, smiles began to appear, genuine appreciation wafted through the air. It was a moment of sheer grace. Almost in unison, people began reaching for their wallets. They were responding to grace, and I'm sure the guys made a killing.

From my perspective, I don't know what makes those moments happen, but I know that grace is the Great Reality, existing before and beyond all of our activities and plans and dreams and burdens and struggles. And for whatever reason, that Great Reality became visible for a short while on a subway platform following a long day in the most powerful city in the world.

When We Disagree

I had an email dialogue with a friend about the whole marriage amendment thing that's such a hot button in America right now. We have a lot of people in our congregation that have very strong feelings about the issue and about the Church's involvement in the issue. Not everyone who loves God holds that same position. How do we talk to each other amicably and with love and respect when we disagree? If we can't do it inside the Church, how do we expect to do it with those outside??

This comment gave me significant pause to think about the issue:

It's hard to love people when you're thinking about how wrong they are. Where's the line between righteous indignation and letting anger rule our hearts?"

My Beloved Son in Whom I am Well Pleased

This is my son: Hudson Taylor (named for the pioneering, mold-breaking, convention-defying, mission-focused missionary of the same name to inland China 150 years ago). I call him my little container of joy.

I couldn't be more proud to know him, love him or be his dad. Maybe it's cliched to say it, but I've learned more about God and what God is like since Hudson came around than in my 32 years previous. The love of a Father for his son is a profound thing

I wanted to post this just because...

(One more reason) why we need community

I'm a big fan of Henri Nouwen. I'll read anything he writes because he writes from the heart with piercing insight. This is from his Genesee Diary written during his time in a Trappist monastery. What if our communities had this attitude and spirit about them?

"Today: The feast of St. Thomas the Apostle. During a dialogue...two of the monks remarked in differenct ways that although Thomas did not believe in the resurrection of the Lord, he kept faithful to the community of the apostles. In that community the Lord appeared to him and strengthened his faith. I find this a very profound and consoling thought. In times of doubt or unbelief, the community can 'carry you along,' so to speak; it can even offer on your behalf what you yourself overlook, and can be the context in which you may recognize the Lord again."

This leads me to ask; What if instead of ranting about correct belief, we practiced correct living?

How to Die

I'm currently meditating on this passage of Scripture from John's Gospel (chapter 12) in the New Testament, which was brought to my attention by a visit to Sacred Space (amazing online prayer and meditation):

Jesus said "Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honour."

The editors of Sacred Space make this profound and difficult insight into the passage:
"The grass sheds its seeds on the soil before it withers. The salmon swims up the stream to die. It is harder for us humans to accept the law of nature, that we too must fade away and find happiness in passing on our riches to others."

I have to admit, that's a tough invitation. But Jesus seems to be saying, hey, this is a fundamental reality of life: deal with it. Want a productive life? Die. Want to increase the happiness of the world around you? Die. Want to get at what life is actually about (as opposed to what I think it's about)? Die.

Now, "dying to self" is a concept firmly rooted in the tradition that nurtured me in my youth. And the concept goes something like this: Give God the "unknown bundle," that is, all the things you don't know you don't know before you know. But the reality is difficult. What does it mean to die to myself?

Jesus isn't talking literal death here, he's talking volitional death. Death of my will asserting itself in every one of my interactions in favor of my way over against some other way. So this is forcing me to wrestle with a whole set of questions.

How should I die? How does that work out with maintaining healthy boundaries? What does that mean for my marriage? My work? My hobbies? My interests? The way I spend my money? The things I allow to rattle around in my head? The emotions I indulge? The emotions I neglect? The thoughts I shove aside? My relationships with my superiors? My relationship to the marginalized and disenfrachised? My relationship to other religions?

This is, as Jesus understood, a core issue of life (as opposed to some minor, comparmentalized religious issue) that most people (including me) are generally never willing to confront.

Christians Gone Wild (in cities)

Tim Keller, of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC, gets it.

What the Gospel is, what it means and how we are to live it. This article (A New Kind of Urban Christian) is part of the Christian Vision Project: An attempt to reenvision the Christian faith for our day and time.

Read it.

Church: The point

I like it simple. Not simplistic, simple.

I ran across this quote by Rob Bell that for me put the whole church-and-why-I-am-here-on-the-planet-thing in perspective. This was from an interview in a Houston paper about his everything is spiritual tour wrapping up this month.

"We are passionate about people being healed on the inside,
and we are passionate about society being healed on the outside," Bell said.
"We would call that the whole Gospel."

John Wesley Rides Again, Part 1 of ?

John Wesley has got to be one of the great figures in the history of the people who follow Jesus. Among other things:

• He is credited with keeping England from a civil war (as happened "across the pond").
  
• His life, thought, preaching and ministry was seminal in helping England abolish slavery without said civil war.
  
• He understood that the message of Jesus meant physical ramifications for people or it wasn't the message of Jesus. His message: "there is no holiness apart from social holiness."
• He wasn't afraid to throw-down with the big boys. The churched gentry (the power-brokers in English society) would have nothing to do with the coal miners or any other group who couldn't appropriately find their way into a church building. As a result, there was an ever widening gap between rich and poor, upper and lower class--all in the name of God, culture and social acceptability.
  
• In contrast, he preached (against his own preferences) outdoors to the coal miners. He had no idea he was getting through until he saw tears coming down their blackened faces.
  
• He made increasing amounts of money each year, but continued to live on the same amount, giving the rest away. He died with no substantial financial assets to speak of.
  
• He exercised regularly and was in excellent physical health into his 70's.
  
• He was fluent in Greek, Hebrew and Latin and required that all who served with him be the same.
  
• His letter writing to people needing spiritual counsel was nothing short of remarkable in its scope and breadth.
  

Single Again...for a little while

My wife if leaving me for six weeks.
It's a work thing that has great possibilities for the future. Hudson is going with her.
When she's gone, I feel like a lost puppy. And I think about the fact that many, many people live with that kind of loneliness all the time. Mother Theresa was right: loneliness is a cancer. A great chance for me to do a ridiculous amount of work though...

The (uninterpreted) Parable

We're getting ready to do a 6-week series at our church on the revolution of God.
For it, I'm putting together brief sermon recap videos for use in our Small Groups, and I;m thinking of using this parable in one of them.
It's one of my favorites from Soren Kierkegaard.

When I searched for the exact wording of it on Google, I found the parable explained away ad nauseum. I'll spare you that silliness. Which leads to a ministry take-away for me: Don't ruin something profound by your explanation of it.

There was a little town of Ducks. Every Sunday the ducks waddled out of their houses and down Main Street to their church. They waddled into the sanctuary and squatted in their proper pews. The duck choir waddled in and takes it place, then the duck minister came forward to preach.
"Ducks! God has given you wings! With wings you can fly! With wings you can mount up and soar like eagles. No walls can confine you! No fences can hold you! You have wings. God has given you wings and you can fly like birds!" All the ducks quacked their amens.

Then the ducks walked home.

Putting Things Back Together

Is it just me, or do we seem to live in "vs." culture? Red vs Blue. Liberal vs Conservative. Immigrant vs Citizen. Church vs "The Culture." Evangelicals vs Gays. Modern vs Postmodern. Seeker-Sensitive vs Emergent. Science vs Religion. Academy vs Practitioner. DaVinci Code vs naive faith.

It's an old story with a continually new title. It plays out in the news, in the church, in the home--we're never safe from "vs." culture. It's always waiting for us in the next interaction or the next decision. It's oppressive.

I'm trying to remember lately that in the middle of this, we are invited to hear a good message--a gospel--that brings people together. And the central thrust of this good message is reconciliation: with God, ourselves, the people around us, with creation itself.

So if I am a true friend of this Gospel, I will work in every setting for reconciliation, right? Kind of like the King's Men, only this time with more measured success? On the surface it seems utopian, but doesn't questioning of the status quo almost always get labeled that way?

The thoughts of two John's on the subject:
John Wesley - "If your heart is as my heart, give me your hand."

Johnny Cash - "...listen to the words that Jesus said about the road to happiness through love and charity, why you'd think he was talkin' straight to you and me."
From "The Man in Black" on the Legend of Johnny Cash album.

Buzz Conference

Just returned from the inagural Buzz Conference in Washington, DC.

There were some glitches, but overall a good experience. Extreme kudos on the Film Festival.

Several takeaways for me:

1 - Get away on a regular basis. The flood of creativity and perspective is crucial.

2 - Be creative by being the church. If we are made in the image of God, then the church is to be the most creative place on earth. Isn't reflecting the Imago Dei more of a value than keen execution of strategy? (not sure I mean to imply some sort of complete dichotomy there).

3 - Go to a big city when you go to a conference. The energy, the vibe, the subway (the DC Metro is amazingly clean and efficient)--it all adds to the experience.

Spirit-Filled Spiritual Formation

Francis Schaeffer, sometime philosophical guru of Evangelicalism--and paradoxically (in my mind) a champion of the arts AND propositionalism--wrote in his excellent book True Spirituality that we eventually come full circle in terms of our understanding and practice of faith. In other words, we start out doing things for one reason (e.g., parental influence, peer pressure, church authority, etc), stop doing them because we find them oppressive, strange, irrelevant, etc, only to eventually find ourselves embracing them again, only for entirely different reasons.

Case in point for me:
The phrase "spirit-filled" has held for sometime a kind of tinny hollowness in my lexicon of meaning. It was something I wanted (for primarily emotional and social reasons) in my younger days and have since spurned because of associations--in my mind--with over-emotionalism and a destructively non-reflective group-think.
Forget for the moment its biblical origins. As is often the case, what we experience often eclipses what Scripture teaches, negating our ability to live and be spiritually formed by Scripture and the church's practice of Scripture. "Spirit-filled", "full of the spirit", et al was just such a thing for me.

Enter an epiphany.
In true Schaefferian form, however, I've come to embrace it. I've realized that the phrase "full of the spirit" denotes for the writers of Scripture that kind of person who displays and lives a fully-orbed Christlike existence. The person who is formed and being formed into the image of Christ. In other words, being "filled with the Spirit" is metaphor, is code for a person who is shot through with love, joy, kindness, patience, peace, self-control and the like. It is a reference to a certain kind of person. As John Wesley noted--the spirit-filled person is the person in which "love so fills the heart there is no room for sin."

There is still the matter of equating "spirit-filled" with "instantaneous," but far be it from me to say that couldn't happen. (It should be noted here that the other often concept often equated with "spirit-filled is "on-fire"). God can, after all, do whatever God wants.
But I don't think it necessarily follows that because God does/did something it necessarily happens/happened in an instant.

To sum up my epiphany, spirit-filled spiritual formation is essentially a redundancy. Both refer to the same process by means of the same Spirit.
Viva the spirit-filled life!

Authentic?

I just listened to a recording of Kyle Lake (former pastor of University Baptist Church in Waco, Tx) giving a seminar at the the Catalyst '05 conference. Kyle was tragically electrocuted in a baptismal pool during one of UBC's services. Catalyst is offering his talk online as a way to honor his memory. You can listen to the seminar here. There's a bit of distortion at the beginning, but stick with it.
His basic thought: Our penchant for formulas leads to our tremendous ability to act instead of being authentic. "Being authentic" can itself be an act.

"Hypocrite" is the appropriate biblical term and it referred to the mask an actor wore in the Greek theater to express or convey an emotion (think of the mask icons frequently used to depict theater). Of course, we all loathe someone who says one thing and then does another. That kind of person is not Jesus' point in calling the Pharisees "hypocrites."

A hypocrite, in the New Testament framework, is someone acting a part that they aren't in reality. A huge temptation for any of us in the helping professions (particularly ministers). We know how to "act" in almost any given setting. But acting is Pharisaical behavior...

We can act in prayer.
We can act in compassion.
We can act in love.
We can act in marriage.
We can act in friendship.
We can act in humility.
We can act in preaching.
We can act in counseling.
All of which are attempts at impression management.

I want you or my parents or myself or God or some old authority figure or some old flame/friend to be impressed with who I am, to value me... so I act. I mean this as a confessional statement. I know how to act. In fact, I'm really good at it and am frequently rewarded for it.

But I can all too easily be a caricature of myself in all those settings (and more). Reminds me of Glittering Images, the first in a series of novels by Susan Howatch. (The whole set should be required reading for every pastor/minister/priest/bishop/spiritual leader). The lead character (a highly respected leader in the church) comes to grips with how he has been a caricature of himself. The writing is superb and poignant.

Consuming Church

Is this true?

The language of commerce, I am more and more convinced, is the antithesis of Kingdom Living. We subvert our own message when we talk in consumerist terms. Consumerism is a kind of spiritual formation—it teaches and shapes people to be a certain kind of person—a taker….not the kind of person we are attempting to shape and form—a giver. I don’t think this is a minor point or an argument of semantics. Come back at me if you disagree… We are in the people business and can be innovative, creative, out of the box without pandering to consumerism. It’s the image of God in us that calls for creativity and innovation, not a market focus!!

For a larger discussion of this issue, see the thread at the Out of Ur blog on leadership in the church.

Marriage Homily

This is a homily I wrote for the first wedding I performed (it was a good friend from college). With my nervousness around "pastoral performance", I completely choked in delivery (manuscripts are not my preferred method of delivery), but the words are good and are a reminder about the purposes of marriage that transcend my need to be "happy."

The wedding was at Hungry Mother State Park in Southwest VA. I'm not sure who the 'hungry mother' is exactly, but Virginia has some of the finest state parks in the nation. Worth a visit if you are the car camping type.

Jeff and his wife (on the left next to me and the fam) are now living in KC, MO where Jeff works for the Ronald McDonald House of KC and Lynn attends St. Paul's School of Theology (UMC).

Photos from the wedding can be viewed here.

"These three remain. Faith, Hope and Love. The greatest of these is love."

You both know that you are part of that great stream of love known as the Kingdom of God. You’ve both signified your entry into it by way of your baptism. It has its grip on you and won’t let you go. It has, as you know, immense dimensions and expansive reach—it is as wide as the universe. There is no place, the Psalmist tells us, where this love does not influence and from which we are safe. You cannot escape the love of God. No one is safe from it. This, I think, the basic message of Jesus. “After everything is over, Love will remain.” So it’s a great stream of which you are a part.

But you are entering new dimensions of it today. Through your marriage to each other, you will measure, explore, face, encounter—and if you are willing—embrace new dimensions of the love of God. The mysterious picture we are given in the New Testament of the love of God in Christ for us is that of marriage. A husband and wife together in complete unity—emotional, physical, mental, psychological—mirrors the love Christ has for his bride, the church. It’s a wonderful picture of the ability of love to unite. And it’s into this mystery you are entering today.

A man is given to a woman and a woman to a man for holy purposes. That is, and I charge you to remember this, God has given you to each other to accomplish his purposes, namely to sanctify you.

To sanctify. Sanctus facer – to make holy. To make whole, good, complete, right, just, full of peace. You aren’t fully those things yet, but you are pledging today to allow God to bring those things to pass through your relationship to each other, to allow your relationship to be a means of grace to each other.

As all married people here today know, You will confront what is not holy—not whole, not complete, not right, not just, not full of peace—both in the other person and yourself. You will confront what is broken, bad, unfair, fractured…unbrushed, unwashed—both in the other person and yourself. But I pray that God will give you grace in that moment to realize that it is the moment of your sanctification. That it is the means God has ordained for your own completion, your own shalom. God is making you holy through a surrender to the work of the Spirit in recreating what you encounter as uncreated in the other and yourself.

That is the moment, by God’s grace, to remember that the greatest of these is love. Faith and hope will someday be realized—we’ll be done with them someday, they’ll be as useless as buggy whips and butter churns. But Love, Love will remain. So it is that Love you are giving yourselves to today. Trust Its dimensions, trust Its depths, trust Its embrace. There is enough for you when you overwhelmed with what is not love in you. There is enough for you to renew and reorder your heart. There is enough for you to be transformed into greater and greater dimensions of glory. Those new dimensions will be scary, but they are holy. You are to each other, a means to grow in love. So remember the counsel of John of the Cross: “in the evening of life, you shall be judged on love.”