for pastors only: my top 5 things pastors should stop pretending to be

This week I read Paul’s injunction in Ephesians 6 to “obey your parents” based on his referencing Exodus 20:12 regarding honoring your parents. Interestingly, Paul paraphrases the commandment with a significant change that could have huge interpretational ramifications. He parenthetically writes that this is the only commandment with a promise, but he changes the wording of the promise, from “so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you,” to “that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.” I’d never caught that before.

The reason this is significant is because it reflects a view that N.T. Wright has offered in his reading of Romans 4:13 in which Paul again changes the wording of a passage in Genesis. Instead of the promise to Abraham of the land of Israel, Paul expands that to a larger vision: the whole world is the inheritance of the family of Abraham, which now includes Gentiles. Paul says in his Galatian letter that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek and that if we belong to Christ, then we are Abraham’s offspring and “heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:28-29).

Of course this would have significant implications in how we consider the current land of Israel and how we interpret the scope of those covenantal promises. Wright has a lot to say about that; he and others have stirred up no small controversy. But I had never before noticed the same theme being subtly expressed in Ephesians 6:1-3: an expansion from the land of Israel to the whole earth.

But none of this is really my point.

My point is that these inferences require a substantial amount of study, and I have to admit that my time is not limited to simply studying theological stances because frankly, I’m a pastor. And the pastor’s main duty is making sure the mission of the local church is carried out, and primarily that’s finding lost people and shepherding them through the process of seekers to servants. And so we have to lean into the expertise of theologians and biblical scholars we’ve learned to trust. It doesn’t mean that we don’t study; it simply means there are people who only and solely do that as a vocation for the purpose of schooling pastors like me. In many ways, a pastor has to be a generalist. We should best be able to pass on creedal basics and lead and shepherd the local church.

So here are my Top 5 Things Pastors Should Stop Pretending to Be:

1.  Bible Scholar.

Face it: we’re not. Anytime I hear the average pastor or TV preacher say, “A better translation in the Hebrew would be…” or “The Greek verb really means…”, I get nervous. I’ve done my own fair share of hacking Hebrew and Greek based solely on a commentary, concordance, century-old Edersheim material and “Follow The Rabbi”-type websites…and it ain’t pretty. And had people who are intensely schooled in dead languages and Koine Greek call me out. As they should.

While pastors must and should study the Bible, it’s not a full-time vocation for us. We should of course know doctrine, understand the canon and its origins, and be able to disciple people through scripture. But we don’t really have the luxury of spending most of our waking hours studying texts because, remember?—we’re pastors. So let’s stop pretending to be Bible scholars. We can read their work, we can quote them, we should know a few, but we’re not them because we can’t hole up in libraries for hours a day and because we have to be with our people in order to lead them.

2.  Theologian.

The Cliff Notes version is this: Bible scholars study text, theologians study what different voices believe about the text. Trees versus forest. And don’t get me started on Biblical theology or systematic theology. But it requires inordinate amounts of time to recognize the nuances and roots of various theological themes. Not for the faint-hearted.

But the argument is the same as #1. Enough said.

3.  Professional Counselor.

I believe in Christian counseling with all my heart. I’ve been to some. It’s like the old joke: Q. “Do you believe in infant baptism?” A. “Heck yeah! I’ve actually seen it!”

But it’s a black hole for pastors. And here’s why: it will suck the leadership and pastoral life out of you. For one, most pastors don’t have enough serious clinical counseling training and, second, most of us suffer from acute messianic complexes—we think if we try hard enough we can fix anything. But people are complex cocktails of spiritual, emotional, relational, neurological and chemical challenges. And I can guarantee the psyche-vampires will find you out and want to meet with you. Endlessly. And drain the pastoral blood out of you.

Sure, we can do generalized Biblical counseling; we can even cast out a few demons. But take it from me: beyond one or two introductory meetings, you’re probably in over your head. If you really enjoy counseling people—and many pastors do—just make sure you get continuing education and training, network with professional counselors in your area, and realize that your leadership of the church and evangelistic thrust will take a backseat. You’ll have great stories for sermons (uh, if you’re discreet and wait two years before you tell any “anonymous” story), but have less time mentoring and modeling for leaders.

There’s a reason why we do our support and recovery work in the context of groups at the Vineyard…and refer intense one-on-ones out to professionals.

Plus, people seem to get better faster when they pay for it.

4.  The Smartest Guy in the Room.

This is more internal with respect to staff/volunteer/leaders meetings. If you’re the lead pastor, people will naturally turn to you when a decision needs to be made or a confirming or counterpoint view requires expression. That’s your job. But just because you have the position and are potentially the decider, it doesn’t make you the sharpest crayon in the box…and the sooner you realize that, the better. What pastors can be is this: expert generalists. You can and should know a little bit about most things (such as these five roles), but you’re not the expert of any one of them.

Besides, all of us have probably worked for different bosses in different contexts. Did you ever seriously think they were the smartest person in the room? Really? And why would you think differently now that you’re in the first chair?

5. Prophet.

I don’t mean that you shouldn’t be prophetic. And I mean the whole range of the prophetic: from classic foretelling to forth-telling, from proclamations about direction…to encouragement…to exposing justice-oriented issues often overlooked.

It’s just that typically prophets don’t make great pastors. They can have an edge that counteracts invitation. A church led by a prophet will typically end up being a small group of spiritual Rambos. And those who lean into a prophetic-stance can be susceptible to becoming authoritative and controlling, copping a my-way-or-the-highway style. Interestingly, church people will easily give authority to a prophetic personality, but when they’re discontent they’ll more-than-likely pull out the “God-card” as to why they’re leaving the church because that’s the style that’s been modeled for them. A dangerous “less-than-transparent and false-authenticity” church culture can quickly develop.

Prophesy, but circumspectly and humbly. And be on guard for spiritual abuse; we can easily fall prey to it.

That’s it, pastors. Now go do your real job.

let's talk about guns

I don’t have a clue how the gun debate will shake out. All one has to do is read the comments after any news post about the latest shooting to learn there are intensely polarized and volatile opinions…and rudeness. And then you have the myriad of “lies, damned lies and statistics”, as Twain put it, as both sides parade their best numbers and argue on their behalf.

All tangled up in this is a founding constitution that protects gun rights, an über-violent entertainment-obsessed culture, a broken-down mental healthcare system, and, let’s be honest, a firearms industry flourishing in our free-market society. Wal-Mart is the largest munitions seller in the country—I’m pretty sure it’s not philosophical for them.

But I don’t want to get into the political arguments here. Frankly, I’m not smart enough. And I have no idea what defines a semi-automatic assault weapon.

I just want to talk to my fellow Jesus-followers. The rest of you can stop reading.

I know Americans have rights. I get that. But I want to have a conversation with people who are Kingdom-people before they are Americans. Because in the end, I’m fairly confident when the sheep and goats are separated, my passport won’t mean a lot. Apparently, what matters in that particular instance is answering a few questions: Did you feed Me? Did you clothe Me? Did you visit Me? I’m going to struggle enough with those. And in that particular passage, those are asked before theological correctness.

But there’s more to it at a deeper level. It’s what I would call a “Philippians 2-incarnational Christianity”-issue. It’s when Paul describes Jesus with a cosmic scope and writes:

He had equal status with God but didn't think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn't claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death—and the worst kind of death at that: a crucifixion. Because of that obedience, God lifted him high and honored him far beyond anyone or anything, ever… 
Philippians 2:6-9 (The Message)

He had all the power, all the privilege, and yet didn’t claim his rights or cling to his advantages. He was God…and let go of it all. That tells me more about Christianity than just about anything. And Paul writes that we are to have that same attitude. Selfless. It’s not about my rights.

That’s difficult for me to hear…and not just about this particular issue. And this isn’t even specifically about pacifism.

I want to go beyond that. When we are ambassadors of another Kingdom, we have to think hard about how we present ourselves and our Kingdom message to a very confused, violent and lost world, a planet under the sway of a malevolent power the Bible personifies as Satan. So my questions are as follows:

Why does it often seem that American evangelical Christians are the first to lobby for no-holds-barred gun rights, and oftentimes the first to vote for war, and yet say we are representatives of the Prince of Peace, the One who said plainly to not return evil for evil and to put away the sword, who never retaliated against violent men, and whose first followers laid down their lives rather that mount a bloody last stand à la Masada? Do we really think Jesus would fight for His right to pack heat? Shouldn’t we at least be the last ones—instead of the first—to jump on the violence-for-violence bandwagon…or at least be just a little more circumspect? Is this really the best Kingdom representation we have to offer? Even if we believe it’s our right as Americans to own whatever firepower we want, is that really a hill Biblical Christians want to die on and be known for?

I understand the nationalistic argument and I get the ramifications. And I could probably have a dog in that fight…if I didn’t have to first think hard about the optics: how do people outside the camp view my Kingdom citizenship? And shouldn’t I think twice about my Kingdom responsibilities before I respond about my American rights? Am I more interested in getting my way, making my point, winning my argument before I truly take the time to be just a little more reflective about how I express the “Jesus in me”?

I’m the only letter they’ll read. So what’s my loudest message?

Please hear me: this isn’t about “taking anyone’s rights away”. This is about being prudent enough to consider what others hear most stridently from us…and our responsibility as Kingdom-citizens before our rights as Americans.

Perhaps those outside of the faith can argue the other points. And believe me: they will.

“The thing you should want most is God’s kingdom and doing what God wants. Then all these other things you need will be given to you.”  Matthew 6:33 (New Century Version)


new year, new hope

On a scale of one-to-ten, how would you rate the hope factor in your life?

I have to admit in years past I’ve viewed the virtue of hope as a kind of weaker brother to faith. I’ve thought of hope as in: I hope it doesn’t snow tomorrow...or I hope my boss isn’t mad at me...or I hope I have the winning raffle ticket...or whatever. In the end, it didn’t seem very practical to me; more like “wishful-thinking” than a hard-as-nails virtue.

The apostle Paul—in juxtaposing temporal and eternal issues in life—refers to three factors in the universe that will absolutely last forever: faith, hope and love. He must have thought more highly of hope than I have. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve discovered this: there is a unique power in the human heart that hope creates, a vital ingredient for emotional and spiritual health.

Fairly often I meet with people who have lost their sense of hope. That’s a dangerous state of mind and heart. It can happen circumstantially: a marriage fails, death visits a family, an overwhelming crisis occurs, a personal failure, a rejection or betrayal, a job loss. Something that shakes you to the core…and the struggle to go on seems not worth the effort of dealing with the problem at hand. When taking a next step in life feels more difficult than our emotional capacity, we can say that we have lost hope. Our “hope tank” is empty.

When the apostle John was an old man, he was exiled on an island for being a Jesus freak. While there he had a vision that offers a radical picture of heaven coming to earth. He writes:

I heard a voice thunder from the Throne: “Look! Look! God has moved into the neighborhood, making his home with men and women! They’re his people, he’s their God. He’ll wipe every tear from their eyes. Death is gone for good—tears gone, crying gone, pain gone—all the first order of things gone.” The Enthroned continued, “Look! I’m making everything new. Write it all down—each word dependable and accurate.”  REVELATION 21:3–5 (MESSAGE VERSION)

John transcribed this vision in a letter to churches in Asia who were undergoing terrific persecution and martyrdom. He knows it’s easy to lose hope when circumstances are unbearably difficult. And so John was infusing them with the virtue of hope. Hope whispers, “All is not finished, there’s more to come.”

For the cynics among us who believe that hope is only wishful thinking, it’s not wishful thinking if it’s true. And it depends what the object of your hope is. If you hope that one day your lost dog will come home, that’s possible if you have a lost dog. But if you hope that one day your lost dog will come home—and you don’t have a dog—chances are pretty sure the dog won’t come home. It really depends on what the preceding reality was.

For those who have surrendered their life to God, they’ve experienced His reality. That is, they’re hope is based on His reality. They’ve tasted and seen that God is good, as Psalm 34 says. They have experienced a truth to base their hope for the future on. Author and pastor Tim Keller describes hope like this (and I’m going to really paraphrase this):

Suppose two guys are hired at a factory and given a job of screwing on caps on bottles on a conveyor belt, one after the other, ten hours a day, every day, seven days a week. The boss says to the first guy, “Work at this for a year, and at the end of the year I’ll give you five-thousand dollars.”

But to the second guy, the boss says, “Work at this for a year, and at the end of that time I’ll give you five-million dollars.”

Who do you think is going to handle that job the best? Yeah, right. The guy making five-thousand dollars is going to give up after a few weeks and say, “This isn’t worth it! This place sucks! This isn’t even minimum wage! I’d rather quit than keep doing this over and over, day after day, 365 days a year.”

But what do you think the guy making five-million dollars will do? How do think he’s going to handle that emotionally? Yeah, he’s whistling while he works, he’s skipping his lunch break, he’s screwing a gazillion caps on a day and he’s smiling. He only has to do this for a year!—for five million dollars!

Interesting thought, eh?

The intellectual and former atheist C. S. Lewis—who became a Christian late in life—once described how suffering can be used by God to shape our character and correct some of the ways that we might avoid God. It can be used to discipline us. That sounded barbaric to Lewis at one time. And then he thought about it and wrote:

“If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place for correction and it's not so bad. Imagine a set of people all living in the same building. Half of them think it is a hotel, the other half think it is a prison. Those who think it a hotel might regard it as quite intolerable, and those who thought it was a prison might decide that it was really surprisingly comfortable. So that what seems the ugly doctrine is one that comforts and strengthens you in the end. The people who try to hold an optimistic view of this world would become pessimists: the people who hold a pretty stern view of it become optimistic.” ~C.S. LEWIS; GOD IN THE DOCK: ESSAYS ON THEOLOGY AND ETHICS, PG.52

The reality of this world being made new in the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God should cause us all to see Christmas—and the ensuing new year—in a different light. The True King has come into the world as one of us, to save as many of us as will surrender to His Kingship, in order that we might bring others along with us to work the works of the Kingdom: setting people free, healing broken people, loving the outcasts, expressing the heart of the King in tangible ways, thereby offering a picture of what is to come.

So let me ask one question: If you knew there was more coming tomorrow, how would you live today? And I don’t just mean “wishful thinking”…I mean really knew there was more than this. It was before Israel was subjugated, exiled to Babylon, and circumstances went completely south, that God said to Jeremiah: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” JEREMIAH 29:11

The Hebrew word used for hope in that verse is tiqvâh, normally translated as hope, but literally a rope. It’s the same word that was used in the story centuries earlier of the Hebrew spies slipping into Jericho. The prostitute Rahab risked her life to safely hide them, asking only that they spare her family’s life.

Before they left, the men told her, “We can guarantee your safety only if you leave this scarlet rope (tiqvâh) hanging from the window. JOSHUA 2:17–18 (NEW LIVING TRANSLATION)

When you think about it, hope is really just a rope anchored to the future.

On a scale of one-to-ten, how would you rate the rope factor in your life?

up against the fb wall… or why i quit facebooking (and everything else)

I’m back.

I decided ten months ago to drop off the social network grid. I stopped blogging and Facebooking. Cold turkey. I’d been blogging regularly for six years (still tweet-resistant). But eventually I found myself slipping into a narcissistic, subtle-but-creepy self-promotion. With only myself to blame. Like Dr. Jeckyll sitting in Regent Park months after trashing his darker-side drug, he congratulated himself for his good works and compared himself to his neglectful and nasty neighbors. Then suddenly with a wave of nausea, he was horrified to find himself slipping into the shape and personality of Mr. Hyde. Who needs a drug when pride can do the job?

Yep, that’s me. I needed a digital cleanser. And so I’ve been absent for a good while. I think I’m ready to return with hopefully a better heart.

But I have to admit there was a secondary rationale from which I wanted to protect myself.

As the presidential election cranked up, it gave me an excuse to avoid reading comments and links that made me embarrassed to be a Christian. And I didn’t want to jump into the fray. I’m old enough to have lived through many presidents and election cycles…and here’s the most common phrase I’ve heard from evangelical Christians and political groupies over all those years (drumroll, please): “This is the most important election in the history of our country.”

Really? I’m not sure how every four years we can have “the most important election in the history of our country”, but that’s what we’re frightened with. I’m totally into Christians being involved in politics, and though I’m fairly Wesleyan in my theology (at least this week…), it doesn’t negate the sovereignty of God. At some point when we’re filling in the little oval or punching the chad in the booth, we have to believe (without succumbing to spiritual nihilism) that God is bigger globally than the party of our choice and is Himself nudging the world toward His purposes. At some point when we’re praying for our country’s leaders and decisions, we have to trust God has heard us and taken our petitions to heart. Otherwise, what’s the use of praying?

Under an oppressive Roman government, in a pseudo-republic where self-obsessed caesars operated dictatorially, the apostle Peter emphatically wrote:

Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every authority instituted among men: whether to the king, as the supreme authority, or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right… Show proper respect to everyone: Love the brotherhood of believers, fear God, honor the king. (1 Peter 2:13–14, 17).

Frankly, I don’t always see “proper respect” or “honoring”—or even civil disagreement—happening with some evangelical Christians when it comes to politics. Elections seem to bring out the dark side: name-calling, blaming, rudeness, factions, disrespect, and really bad theologizing. Have we bought into the idea that if we can get “our guy” holding the reins of power, then we can legislate in our favor with a “power-over” approach, while somehow sidestepping the subtly cancerous effects of power and money?

In his classic book To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, James Davison Hunter describes how politicization has trumped all approaches to change. Everything has become political.

He describes how each side uses a common story to forward their agenda, rooted in the French word ressentiment. Ressentiment encompasses more than the anglicized word resentment; it includes envy, rage and revenge that informs a political psychology.

Hunter writes:

“Ressentiment is grounded in a narrative of injury or, at least, perceived injury; a strong belief that one has been or is being wronged. The root of this is the sense of entitlement a group holds. The entitlement may be to greater respect, greater influence, or perhaps a better lot in life and it may draw from the past or the present; it may be privilege once enjoyed or the belief that present virtue now warrants it. In the end, these benefits have been withheld or taken away or there is a perceived threat that they will be taken away by those now in positions of power. . . Over time, the perceived injustice becomes central to the person’s and the group’s identity. Understanding themselves to be victimized is not a passive acknowledgement but a belief that can be cultivated. Accounts of atrocity become a crucial subplot of the narrative, evidence that reinforces the sense that they have been or will be wronged or victimized. Cultivating the fear of further injury becomes a strategy for generating action. It is often useful at such times to exaggerate or magnify the threat. . . And so it is, then, that the injury—real or perceived—leads the aggrieved to accuse, blame, vilify, and then seek revenge on those whom they see as responsible. The adversary has to be shown for who they are, exposed for their corruption, and put in their place.”

It’s funny. From the conservative evangelical position, entitlement is usually a word leveraged against the other side. It’s a weighty buzzword to blast people supposedly taking advantage of the system. But we rarely think of ourselves—or our side—as having a sense of entitlement. Perhaps it’s the classic “two-by-four in your own eye” that Jesus warned us about.

But here’s a thought: when we feel our powerbase slipping, though entitlement may be the last word we apply to ourselves, what if it’s really what we secretly feel? Could that be what is behind the “taking-back-our-country” language that emerges during elections? Is it our fear of losing some sort of power we assume we have? Is it a longing for what we feel we’re entitled to?

Kierkegaarde warned Christians of the marriage of Church and state… and the dangers of blurring politics and faith, leading to a watering-down of the gospel. Shocking his contemporaries, he wrote:

“What Christianity needs is not the suffocating protection of the state; no, it needs fresh air, it needs persecution, and it needs God’s protection. The state only works disaster, it wards off persecution and thus is not the medium through which God’s protection can be conducted. Above all, save Christianity from the state. By its protection it smothers it to death.”

Okay, this has turned into a diatribe. All this to say: I’m getting back online after an extended hiatus. I’m still mostly avoiding FB, but I’ll check in periodically.

Gee, this could’ve been a lot shorter. But that’s what I meant to say…

The LORD Almighty has sworn, “Surely, as I have planned, so it will be, and as I have purposed, so it will stand.” (Isaiah 14:24)

reason versus faith part 3

Recommended Resources for BARRIERS:

Reason/Apologetics:
• Mere Christianity: C. S. Lewis
• Reasonable Faith: William Lane Craig
• The Reason for God: Timothy Keller
• Christianity for Modern Pagans: Peter Kreeft
• Can Man Live Without God?: Ravi Zacharias

…two simple “first start” books:
• The Case for Faith and The Case for Christ: Lee Strobel

Science:
• The Language of God: Francis Collins
• Absence of Mind: Marilynne Robinson
• Lost World of Genesis One: John Walton
• Beyond the Cosmos: What Recent Discoveries in Astrophysics Reveal about the Glory and Love of God: Hugh Ross
• www.biologos.org

Evil:
• The Problem of Pain: C. S. Lewis
• Evil and the Justice of God: N. T. Wright
• Screwtape Letters: C. S. Lewis
• The Gift of Pain: Philip Yancey and Paul Brand
• Is God to Blame?: Greg Boyd
• Tim Keller’s 9/11 Anniversary speech: http://davidkpark.wordpress.com/2006/09/26/timothy-keller-transcript-the-problem-of-suffering/

Miracles/supernatural:
• Surprised by the Power of the Spirit: Jack Deere
• Power Evangelism: John Wimber
• Surprised by Hope: N. T. Wright
• Miracles (an apologetic): C. S. Lewis

reason versus faith part 2

Lately I’d heard several stories of young Christians trotting off to college and getting blown out of their faith because of hearing views that didn’t harmonize with their Sunday-school version of faith. Listen: faith is rigorous, not opposed to reason, and not for the faint-hearted.

And a lot of the time it seems to center on creation and science…which is unfortunate in my mind. It doesn’t have to be that way. Believe it or not, evangelical Christians have different views on the issue.

There are basically four positions that Christians take regarding this issue. I’m indebted to my fellow Vineyard Pastor Ken Wilson in Ann Arbor for this overview…

Young Earth: This position says the earth was created six to ten thousand years ago. Each species was created separately with no common biological root. Once each species was created, it remains fixed. Small changes are allowed, but none so great that they eventually result in two species where there was once only one. Of the four positions, this maintains the maximum disagreement with mainstream science. Evangelicals who hold this position include John MacArthur, Josh McDowell, John Maxwell, and Charles Stanley.

Old Earth: This position says the earth could be as old as mainstream scientists say; the six days of creation in Genesis 1 could be six eras, when each species (though species may be defined flexibly) was separately created, with no descent from common ancestors. The theory of evolution has no merit, except to account for changes within a given species. This position maintains much disagreement with mainstream science, though less than the Young Earth position. A primary writer is Hugh Ross and the evangelical leaders in the U.S. who hold this view are way too many to mention.

Intelligent Design: This position is a relative newcomer to the debate, championed by writers like Philip Johnson. However, it’s difficult to assess this view because it’s advocates hold a wide range of views. Many who hold Young Earth and Old Earth positions advocate this position in public debate. Others, like Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box, leave a lot of room for evolutionary process. Behe articulates what he views as a key weakness in evolutionary theory, what he calls “irreducible complexity.” Some biological structures are so complex that it’s difficult to imagine how an evolutionary process could account for them. There are so many using the language of Intelligent Design these days, but certainly Behe’s position involves less disagreement than the Young Earth and Old Earth positions, but it’s still substantial.

The fourth view is Theistic Evolution: This position says that God, working through evolution, created. Theistic evolution objects to scientists who step beyond their science to say that evolution proves that there cannot be a creator God. These are scientists who claim that since we have in evolution a mechanism that accounts for the diversity of life as we know it, then it follows that there is no creator God, no purpose in creation, and no design, not even in a big picture or theological sense. Theistic evolution says, “That’s just importing atheism into science; nothing in the science itself justifies that conclusion.” Many big guns, even in the field of evolutionary biology, agree. Theistic Evolution has many variations but certainly many who hold it would claim that Genesis is not meant to be read as science. God is very much the author, the text is inspired, reliable and authoritative. It simply isn’t meant to convey a scientific understanding of origins.

There are a growing number of evangelical Christians taking this position. Much in the writings of C.S. Lewis suggests that he held this view. B.B. Warfield, a contributor to Christian fundamentalist movement and a very conservative scholar who championed the “inerrancy” doctrine of Scripture, held to a version of this. Billy Graham is friendly to this view, along with Francis Collins, John Stott, Tim Keller, Peter Enns, to some degree J. I. Packer, and even Pope John Paul II.

I’m not here to tell you which of these views you should adopt, but I am saying there is a wide-range of very respected Christian thinkers, theologians and scientists who do not take a monolithic view on the interpretation of the opening chapters of Genesis…and all deeply love Jesus and His atoning work on the cross for us. But for us to have a relevant voice in the culture, we need to be wise.

When Galileo was inquisitioned by the Church for promoting heliocentrism (the earth wasn’t the center of the universe and actually revolved around the sun—not a totally new thought but the Church considered it only a theory), his accusers based their view on scriptures like Psalm 93:1: Surely the world is established, so that it cannot be moved (NKJV)…and multiple verses about the sun “rising and setting”, proving that the sun moved around planet earth. And since scripture cannot lie, then Galileo must be wrong.

Galileo would write: “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use.”

Physics professors Loren and Deborah Haarsma of Calvin College write:

“The Galileo incident shows us that the Holy Spirit can sometimes use discoveries of science to prompt us to reexamine our interpretation of Scripture, leading us ultimately to a better understanding of Scripture. We should not neglect this means by which God can teach us new things.”

Or as the proverb says, Wise men and women are always learning, always listening for fresh insights. Proverbs 18:15 (Message Version)

Again, my reason for talking about this is not to convince you of any particular view, but to reconsider the idea that you have to park your brain at the door to become a follower of Jesus. But you may need to do some research. And truth is, all four views have difficulties Biblically…and to varying degrees, scientifically. But you have to think.

I love how Luke, the physician, historian, and someone who took some hellish missionary trips with his friend Paul, writes to a friend to help him in any open questions he might have regarding the truth of Jesus the messiah. Luke would have lived before and after the time of Jesus’ resurrection. His gospel is simply a letter written to his friend Theophilus. Luke writes:

Most honorable Theophilus: Many people have written accounts about the events that took place among us. They used as their source material the reports circulating among us from the early disciples and other eyewitnesses of what God has done in fulfillment of his promises. Having carefully investigated all of these accounts from the beginning, I have decided to write a careful summary for you, to reassure you of the truth of all you were taught. Luke 1:1–4 (New Living Translation)

In other words, “Theophilus, your heart has experienced the reality of God, but you may have some open questions intellectually, or some doubts regarding the historicity of the stories. I’ve taken the time to investigate this thoroughly so that you can trust the reports you’ve heard…”

The reality is: There are honest, real issues that Christians have to wrestle with: Why is there suffering? What is the origin of evil? How can natural calamities happen if God is good? Our most painful questions are usually more along philosophical, moral and theological lines than scientific. That’s simply because science, in general, is designed to answer “how” questions, not “why” questions.

I’ve recently been posting Facebook questions, such as “If Jesus sat across the table from you, what would you ask Him?” All of sudden there were over 160 comments…some funny ones, of course, but many of them were heartbreaking, as in “Why did my baby…” or “Why did my marriage…” or “How come cancer took my mom…”—issues of loss and pain and brokenness.

Another question was: “Total honesty: what barrier keeps you from deeply experiencing God?”—and again very vulnerable comments were posted exposing a longing to know why God did or didn’t do certain things.

And beneath all those comments is an undercurrent of fairness or justice. Something is simply not fair. “That’s not right.” “That’s not just.” The unfairness of life and circumstances was a common theme. That issue was a large part of former atheist C.S. Lewis’ whole problem with God in classic little book: Mere Christianity. He writes:

“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I gotten this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

“…In the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist — in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless — I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality — namely my idea of justice — was full of sense. Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”

In the end, reason will lead you to the doorway of God, but it won’t take you in. Reason will take you all the way to the door, but it won’t turn the handle. That’s where the actions of grace, repentance and faith must kick in. To experience God, one has to walk through a very small and narrow door that one can only fit through humbly on one’s knees. The only way in is via humility…with just enough self-awareness to say, “Maybe I’m not as smart as I thought I was. Maybe not as clever as I think. Maybe I don’t have all the answers. Maybe I’m more broken than I realize. Maybe there is something more to this life than this life.” Repentance means to change your mind. That’s why the Bible says that a fool says there is no God (Psalm 53:1). It’s the fool who believes he already knows everything, who has such little self-awareness that he can’t see any need. Only a fool would accept the senselessness of the universe as a way to live.

Again, often the problem is not an intellectual one, but a moral one.

The amazing Jewish prophet Isaiah—the prince of prophets in my mind, persecuted for his proclamations—once had a word from God for his people, his tribe. Israel had become so defined by her rebellion against God in the worst religious ways, that God had some gut wrenching things to say to them:

“Come now, let us reason together,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool. Isaiah 1:18

Once that condition is taken care of, then you’ll know God. Or as Jesus put it, “You shall know the truth…and it will set you free.”

[ Part 3 contains some recommended resources ]
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reason versus faith part 1

Disclaimer: Some people asked me for notes about the talk last weekend; I supposed it stirred some things up. Here’s the bulk of it…in three parts. I warned you.

In this segment of the weekend series Barriers, we tackled Reason versus Faith. The argument goes like this: since the Enlightenment, light-year advances in the sciences, archaeological discoveries of other Ancient Near Eastern texts, the development of brand new fields like psychology, genetics and neuroscience, and the overthrow of the Church as a socio-political power creating a cultural context to question what were absolutes, launched an undercurrent of modernist thought that reflected this idea in the most simplest terms: no rational person can believe in a personal god any more than belief in a tooth fairy. We all know who puts the money under the pillow at night and pockets the little incisor. Religion was seen as a dinosaur, lumbering around with a brain the size of a walnut, doomed to extinction. It was viewed as anti-intellectual, anti-science and antiquated.

In high school and college I laughed at the idea of a god. I was way too smart for that. What’s more, I had felt the sting of so-called good church people who judged me because of the way I dressed and the length of my hair. There were churches I would not have been allowed in. It seemed to me that Christians were mean-spirited, hypocritical, judgmental and frankly backward. Creation could be explained naturally, telescopically we had found no evidence of heaven “out there”, and the supernatural stories of the Yahweh God seemed as unlikely as Zeus. The Bible was filled with contradictions as old as the Scopes Monkey Trial: just look at the opening chapter of Genesis—you have three days and nights before God made the sun…let alone calling the moon a light. And don’t get me started on where Cain found a wife. I had good reasons to be an agnostic at best.

And so in my dismissal of all-things-God, I assumed that morality was a human construct as well and, frankly, sexuality was purely animalistic and finally the Sexual Revolution had dawned on the human race. In my mind, everything was being liberated from restrictions, and certainly medieval ones.

And then a funny thing happened on my way to hell.

I met Jesus.

I’ve told my personal God-story before so there’s no need to rehash it. But what happened was that people inexplicably began popping into my path telling me how their lives had changed by surrendering to Jesus. What I had to admit was that they seemed different in some way than the people I hung out with. What’s more, I couldn’t argue with their personal experience. I had no reason to think they were lying; for one, several of them were family members who radically changed. I could certainly say they were going through a phase (“They’ll get over it…”)…or had joined some cult and been hypnotized…or that the basis for their conversion was no more than mythology. But nevertheless, they had experienced something. That was undeniable.

They had something I didn’t.

The genius author, mathematician, and philosopher Pascal, after he came to Christ in a dramatic way, once described the condition of someone who doesn’t know God like this:

“I know not who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I myself am. I am in terrible ignorance of everything. I know not what my body is, nor my senses, nor my soul, not even that part of me which thinks what I say, which reflects on all and on itself, and knows itself no more than the rest. I see those frightful spaces of the universe which surround me, and I find myself tied to one corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I am put in this place rather than in another, nor why the short time which is given me to live is assigned to me at this point rather than at another of the whole eternity which was before me or which shall come after me. I see nothing but infinites on all sides, which surround me as an atom, and as a shadow which endures only for an instant and returns no more. All I know is that I must soon die, but what I know least is this very death which I cannot escape.

“…Such is my state, full of weakness and uncertainty. And from all this I conclude that I ought to spend all the days of my life without caring to inquire into what must happen to me. Perhaps I might find some solution to my doubts, but I will not take the trouble, nor take a step to seek it; and after treating with scorn those who are concerned with this care, I will go without foresight and without fear to try the great event, and let myself be led carelessly to death, uncertain of the eternity of my future state.”

You would think that just stopping to reflect on life for more than ten minutes would cause us to go on a desperate search for God, but instead, we jam our time with diversions and busy-ness to avoid the despair and angst that naturally comes when you do think about those things.

I had one other problem I had to admit…and hated to confess: I felt deeply and intensely lonely in the universe. British writer G.K. Chesterton famously wrote: “Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.” I had to admit that the stuff I was drinking, smoking, ingesting and watching was not really filling my heart. I felt like the story in John’s gospel of Jesus and the woman at the well: “If you have water that can make me never thirst again, give it to me!” There seemed to be a big hole in my soul that had me puzzled.

And so I would think and think about this Jesus-thing late at night. And when I finally surrendered my life to Him in a church in Clifton, things started to change remarkably. I began to discover how much God really loved me…that I had a purpose in the universe…that life isn’t all random events...that I could actually experience the Spirit of God in a real way. That was pretty mind-bending.

But a few months into it, the doubts came roaring in. What if I psyched myself into this? What about other religions and their truth-claims? What if the stories of Jesus were made up…or at least exaggerated? What about issues of evolution and the Biblical creation story? How do I deal with doubts?

In other words, I knew I had experienced something real, but I had a lot of intellectual—not to mention practical—questions to be answered. Something had happened to my heart, but my head had real questions. Part of the problem was that I had bought into the atheist mantra that only people with double-digit IQ’s believe in God.

Now here’s what’s funny. Somehow I had overlooked scientists like Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Newton, Faraday, Mendel, Planck (the father of quantum theory) and Francis Collins (head of the Human Genome Project).

Interestingly enough, in a recent study from Rice University, over sixty percent of natural scientists—people in disciplines like physics, chemistry and biology—said they believe in God. That’s much higher than I would have thought. While a separate survey from the University of Chicago revealed that 76 percent of doctors said they believed in God.

And what’s more, I somehow missed brilliant authors like Dante, Shakespeare, Dafoe, Bronte, Hugo, Longfellow, Dickens , Harriet Beecher Stowe, Swift, Wordsworth, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, Flannery O'Connor, Graham Greene…and even, uh, John Grisham.

Or artists who believed in God like, DaVinci, Rembrandt, Albrecht Durer, Michelangelo, Cezanne, Delacroix, Renoir, Blake, and Matisse.

And brilliant musicians and composers like Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Charlie Hines, Jim Zartman…not to mention the Fray, Common, Switchfoot, the Civil Wars, Mutemath and Mumford and Sons.

Or what about brilliant philosophers like Hegel, Kant, Kierkegaard, Spinoza, Wittgenstein and Barth?

The only reason I’m mentioning these—and they weren’t all Christians, but did believe in God—is because there’s a “pub theology” that says that smart people don’t believe in God. That’s so arrogant and narrow-minded it’s embarrassing.

And so I prayed that God would put me a place where there were books and I could read and learn (I had earlier tossed away a four-year scholarship to chase a music career). I landed a job at the Public Library downtown and discovered in about the Dewey Decimal 220’s that there were actually brilliant Christian writers and a whole area of study called apologetics that challenged my mind and got me thinking way more sharper to answer ontological and theological questions that had been tearing me apart.

The learning is this: if you have doubts, don’t be afraid of questions, but approach it scientifically…look at the evidence for proof. If you’re going to do serious studious research into Christianity or have questions regarding its validity, don’t just read the pseudo-intellectual agnostic blogs with their interpretations of it, but go to the source material. Find Christians who are smarter and sharper than you and find out what they have to say. I’d have to say that C. S. Lewis saved my life with three books: Mere Christianity, The Problem Of Pain and Miracles.

In other words, feed your faith, not your doubts.

[ Part II continues… ]
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midrash versus therapeutic...and pastoral baggage

The bulk of this weekend’s message was based on a single chapter from Henry Cloud’s last book Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward. Years ago I was in a small gathering of leaders with Henry as he outlined the three types of people that the wisdom books of the Bible depict: the wise man, the fool and the evil man. I found it fascinating. Necessary Endings reflects Henry’s continued foray into the secular book market and toward more leadership/organizational consulting, so it has no explicit references to scripture. We’ve met a few times on the road and hosted his conference at the Vineyard some years back. His work has been extremely helpful to me, both personally and for research purposes.

But here’s the baggage for me.

As a pastor and communicator, the frustration we can feel in tackling a topical series like Baggage about relational dysfunction is simple: a sermon can easily devolve into a list of helpful, prescriptive ideas that any good counselor or therapist would suggest. There’s obviously nothing wrong with that, but as a spiritual leader I have to make sure I balance that with the Kingdom-message that we are meant for more than self-actualization or attaining emotional health as an end in itself. The more is: humbling ourselves and fitting into God’s story and His work.

Part of a sermon like this past weekend—stripped of it’s Biblical moorings—could be a message heard outside of a church without any reference to the work of the Holy Spirit, or as Joe Boyd and I have conversed about, simply a “self-help” message devoid of any necessary interaction with God. The potential is certainly there.

It’s not surprising, though, that a series like Baggage is typically the more popular ones we offer. After all, most people want to know how to get better, that is, better at being a husband, a friend, a mother, an employee, a human being. After all, it’s our relationships that seem to cause us the most pain. And truth is truth; Proverbs was written way before the Stephen Coveys and Dr. Phils of the world.

Some rabbis use an exegetical style called a midrash. An oversimplified description (forgive me, seminarians) would be storytelling that depends less on the authority of the text and zeroes in on the hearer’s intuitive ability and personal reflection created in the moment by the Spirit of God. There can be a potency in the interpretive story that allows God to give insight beyond the obvious, and may even create an inner tension for the listener that forces a deeper wrestling with the text.

Some contemporary teachers/preachers use a therapeutic or prescriptive model, more common to topical series, filled with advice that’s rooted in scripture. It’s a bit like Proverbs: if you do this, you’re a wise person and life will frankly work better for you. This would have been especially reflective of many of the sermon series in the 1990’s: How to Affair-Proof Your Marriage, Building a Healthy Family, Five Steps to Avoid Burnout, etcetera. Not only were they practical and helpful, but they served as an attractional element for un- or dechurched people, as in: “Hey! Finally a church that has some relevance to my life…”. It moved beyond the altar-call, “get-out-of-this-world” salvation-only emphasis of many evangelical churches and created a context for invitation as well as developing emotionally healthier and more holistic people.

But here's a thought: I think the sermon on the mount—Matthew 5, 6 & 7—is actually a prime example of both approaches: midrash and therapeutic. There are moments of super-pragmatic counsel but it’s wrapped in a powerful Kingdom overview that drives the meta-message. The first twelve verses—the Beatitudes—can create an inner conflict that is powerful.

For you fresh young pastors, teachers and communicators, consider a balance in your speaking. Listen to some teachers who are polar-opposite of your style. Think of the differences between Tim Keller and Andy Stanley; both are wonderfully gifted communicators, but radically different in methodology, pacing and approach. Check out people who are not just different from you tribally and theologically, but communicate in a way that you might even preconceive as irritating.

And wrestle a bit with your own exegetical baggage.
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a Christmas miracle

True story: During a cold Christmas Eve night in 1914, on one side of a bleak barbed-wire-laced stretch of hell called No Man’s Land, a German soldier began singing a hymn. When the opposing Scottish and French soldiers slowly started singing along, peace broke out for a few brief hours during the first world war as soldiers crossed enemy lines to share photos and exchange stories and liquor.

Now let your imagination get crazy: Jim Wallis and James Dobson have dinner with each other on Christmas Eve night in a restaurant a few blocks from the Washington D.C. mall…


“What can I get you gentlemen to drink?” Their server sported a closely cropped beard framing a gentle smile. He’d been serving for years; too much ‘teeth’ comes off like a salesman and that’s the last thing anyone wants in a restaurant.

James ordered an unsweetened iced tea with limes. Jim asked for a Riesling.

“You know, Jim, if you’re having alcohol, a red would’ve been better for your heart,” James offered. “There’s not much more than sugars and calories with yours.”

“Thanks, doc. But at my age, I have bigger things to worry about than that. Appreciate your concern, though.”

“Hey, the least I can do for a fellow believer! At least, you still are, right?” grinned James slyly.

“Whoa, big guy. Slow down. I have fond remembrances of you. I used to listen to you on the radio when I was young…”

“Ouch, ” winced James.

“…and I have a lot of respect for your parenting advice to young couples,” Jim continued. “I think stats show that dads are more involved in parenting than ever before. You may have had something to do with that. I’m an old guy myself…but with two boys in little league, that’s still pretty good stuff you wrote!”

James smiled. “It was my genuine concern for families—which I still think is the bedrock of society—that led me into questioning government policy.”

Jim practiced a little reflective listening. “So what you’re saying is that a particular ‘concern’ led to your involvement in politics. That’s exactly what happened to me! I felt God was very interested in that, but God’s politics were overwhelmingly concerned for the poor and marginalized, at least in my Bible. When the wealthiest country in the world, who consumes the most resources, has one of the lowest percentages of global giving toward the poor, I knew we Christians had a responsibility to challenge the policies that affect our national budget…let alone our personal consumerism.”

“That may be true, Jim. But the stats also show that the healthiest, most economically stable and generous relational unit is the family…so what better income-generator for a country? Wallerstein’s research showed that where a family has both a mom and dad in the household, children are more emotionally secure, have more potential, are less dependent on government money, and generally more productive. It’s the building block of society. So when the historic concept of marriage is turned on its head, some fracture is inevitable. And if we’re aborting every third baby, we’ve not only devalued God’s word—remember? He said that children were a blessing, even a heritage from Him—but what’s more, we’re devaluing human life itself. No society can flourish like that.”

“Ditto, as your buddy Limbaugh says,” grinned Jim.

“Low blow. But he’s not all wrong. Just, uh, shrill,” laughed James.

The server returned with drinks, recommended the special, and took both orders. “One check or two?” he asked, tossing a glance at both equally, being careful not to assume any power positioning at the table.

Almost on cue, both men pointed at the other and said, “His!” and chuckled. The server smiled again, and set a warm, sliced baguette wrapped in cloth between them. With butter knives in hand, Jim continued where they stopped.

“But James, when you aligned yourself and your ministry so clearly with one political party, it’s assumed you also signed on to all they stand for.”

“I can’t help it if they were the only ones standing up for family values,” said James. “And how is that any different from what you’ve done with your friends on the other side of the aisle?”

Jim gently retorted, “Do you really believe they’re the only ones standing up for family values? Let’s talk about Sanford, Ensign, Pickering, Giuliani…”

“(*cough*) Edwards, Clinton, Spitzer (*cough*),” mugged James.

“Okay, I get it. But my guys were the only ones speaking out against economic disparity,” continued Jim. “Your hyper-individualistic approach to the gospel ignores passages about God’s heart for systemic justice. I mean, what could level the playing field more than Israel’s jubilee mandate?”

“Well, it’s one thing to talk about systems, but get real: data shows that conservatives are personally more generous when it comes to charitable giving,” James said.

“Yeah, but that still doesn’t alleviate a ‘systems’ issue. For heaven’s sake, James, you have to admit that in general conservatives were the drivers of Jim Crow laws. There’s been no greater instigator of economic injustices than racism,” Jim countered.

“Go back a little further in your history, Jim: Lincoln was a Republican,” James responded with a smile.

“But a very different party in the mid-1800’s, don’t you think?” said Jim.

“Whatever.”

“The point is,” commented Jim, “that when the church is only known for two issues, we lose our ability to reach into certain cultures in our society. We’ve got to be bigger than that. And what’s bigger than caring for the poor, speaking out against oppression and corporate colonialism and questioning how much wealth is too much? It’s hard to read the book of James and not feel prophetic in our day.”

“You’re narrowing it down as well, Jim,” said James, sipping his tea. “How do you avoid the sexual ethos of scripture? How do we turn a blind eye to eighty babies aborted every minute in the world? How did we come to label human life so disposable? If ever ‘slippery slopes’ exist, this is one. Or two.”

“Agreed. But on the other hand, how come ‘conservative Christians’ seem to be the first ones to shout for war…or support the death penalty? Doesn’t that strike you as, er, odd?” probed Jim. “Seems to me that doesn’t jibe with ‘Sermon on the Mount’-stuff to me.”

“Is it ‘jibe’ or ‘jive’? I’m never quite sure. And isn’t that really outdated slang?” questioned James, injecting a bit of humor to lower the room temperature. “Look, Jim, it’s an old argument, but I’m pretty sure you’d pick up a baseball bat and defend your wife if a serial rapist broke into your house. There are rational arguments for extrapolating that out nationalistically; Augustine wrestled with ‘just war’ theories just a few centuries after Jesus. My involvement in politics had less to do with which party and more to do with the policies promoted in each party. And eventually, I became convinced it was less the executive or legislative branches that was the problem, and more the judicial powers appointed—not voted, mind you—into lifetime appointments by the party in power. Hey, I practically coined the phrase ‘activist judges’.”

Jim squinted and smiled. “That sword cuts both ways, friend. ‘Activist judges’ in a conservative court essentially reinforced the idea recently that ‘corporations are persons’ and have the same rights as a person. How about that for setting the stage for new levels of corporate political abuse and greed under the guise of personal rights? If a corporation is considered a person, would you have wanted your daughter to marry Lehman Brothers? Ha! Talk about a philosophical ‘slippery slope’! And what’s the bugaboo?—government has always had to regulate Wall Street and corporate overreach and indulgence. You know the scripture: the love of money is the root of all evil.”

“Okay, Jim, maybe we have a different prioritization of values,” James offered. “And certainly different philosophies when it comes to how to play out our scriptural views. I wondered what we could gain if we could find common ground?”

Jim stared at his plate for a moment before speaking. “I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “James Davison Hunter has something to say about how cultures are changed. I have to admit that I like his ‘faithful presence’ concept and tend to agree with him that nowadays the ‘public witness’ of the church has become only a ‘political witness’…and not always for the better. Though even that’s part of my rationale for voicing a different view than yours: so we weren’t branded a one-trick pony. But we’ve been at odds with each other for so long it’s created factions in the Church. And scripture is clear that disunity is disastrous, the whole ‘I’m of Apollos, I’m of Paul’-type thing. How is one more spiritual than the other? I wish we could somehow…”

“I don’t think I can buy Hunter’s slant,” interrupted James. “But I found his caution about power intriguing. His view of ressentiment—the anger, rage or revenge that motivates so much political activism today—as being grounded in a ‘narrative of injury’ or the perception that ‘our side has been wronged’ is truer than I want to admit. It certainly shapes a group’s identity. You hear it when one is attacking the opposition and the response is, ‘Yes, but don’t forget when you were in power, you did…’. All of a sudden, it’s a case of the Hatfields (and I don’t mean Mark!) and McCoys. You hit my guy…I hit yours. It’s kind of like a political Crips and Bloods.”

“Or an East coast - West coast rappers, thing,” suggested Jim.

“Huh?” queried James.

“And I utterly hate how we must appear to ‘outsiders’ of the faith,” Jim added. “For a while, the ‘unsaved’ person with a similar political slant loves us, but the one with differing politics thinks we’re absolutely the devil.”

A folding tray appeared along with their waiter and a younger helper deftly setting steaming food on the table.

“Is there anything else I can get you?” asked the bearded waiter as the other server scurried off. Assured all was well, he began to turn away and suddenly stopped. He leaned into the table slightly and with a whisper asked, “I couldn’t help overhearing part of your conversation. Uh, I’m not really into the whole church-thing, but I wondered: would Jesus fit in this town—D.C.—in any way?”

James and Jim glanced across the table at each other and smiled. Jim answered, “Oh, undoubtedly. He’s well known as a ‘friend of sinners’. What better place than Washington for that?”

“He found me,” laughed James.

The waiter paused, pulled out their check in his apron pocket, and said quietly, “This one’s on the house. Merry Christmas.”

After dinner, James and Jim found themselves on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. A light snow was starting to fall, forming halos around the streetlights. They hugged, exchanging the proverbial three manly pats on the back. After a quick update on their respective families and final goodbyes, they walked off in opposite directions into the night.

And oddly enough, they both began whistling the same hymn.

do people hate me?

There are many things that Christians are doing in this postmodern era that are exemplary. The renewed call to global, faith-fueled activism spurred by the overwhelming number of texts in scripture regarding God’s heart for the poor and marginalized is hopefully changing the stereotypical negative views of the Church. It was the Roman Emperor Julian who violently hated Christians and irritatingly wrote in a letter that, “These impious Galileans not only feed their own poor, but ours also; welcoming them into their (love-feasts), they attract them, as children are attracted, with cakes. Whilst the pagan priests neglect the poor, the hated Galileans devote themselves to works of charity…”

But I’ve noticed something that slightly troubles me, though. In a culture that places a premium value on tolerance and acceptance (a just reaction to hate-crime violence and shrill web voices), it’s natural to assume that we, as Christians, want to be loved, experienced and viewed as tolerant and accepting people, especially as The Church, the fountainhead of grace. After all, if that’s how the culture defines love, we need to speak in a language they understand. That’s what good missionaries do. And who wants to be experienced as intolerant and unaccepting? Certainly not followers of the Friend of sinners.

Besides, weren’t the people that argued the most with Jesus the religious types? Those were the ones who put God in a box, right? Those were the ones Jesus said travelled over land and sea to find one convert and make him more of a child of hell than themselves. Can you imagine Pharisee hashtags if Twitter existed then?—#killthecultleader.

But before we look down our noses at “religious people” and “church folks” (an easy target since it’s always the people other than us and our little circle of enlightened bloggers and friends), it might be circumspect to consider passages where the “culture” or the “world” is clearly viewed as no friend of the Church...

When an adulterous woman is misogynistically dragged before Jesus (where was the loverboy?), Jesus expressed compassion and zero-condemnation. But He added a postscript: “From now on don’t sin.”

It was Jesus who reminded His followers, “When the world hates you, remember it hated me before it hated you. The world would love you if you belonged to it, but you don’t. I chose you to come out of the world, and so it hates you.” (John 15:18–19)

To the self-professed sinner—Peter—who was part of Jesus’ inner circle, Jesus snapped, “Get away from me, Satan! You are a dangerous trap to me.”

It was Gentile Roman military men who mocked Jesus’ kingship and drove the nails and divided up His clothes at the cross.

It was the businessmen and profiteers who wanted to kill Paul in Ephesus. They did it under the guise of pagan religion, but the bottom line was their bottom line (Acts 19:23, 27).

After a new age-type psychic lost her ability to tell fortunes because of an on-the-spot exorcism by Paul, her infuriated Gentile business managers have Paul and Silas arrested, beaten mercilessly and thrown in jail. Follow the money.

Before the brother of Jesus is martyred, he penned this reminder: Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. (James 4:4)

It was an exiled John who reminded Jesus freaks: Don’t be surprised, dear brothers and sisters, if the world hates you. (1 John 3:13)

Paul was beheaded at the hands of Gentiles. Previously he wrote: Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. (Romans 12:2a Message Version)

In Athens, Greece—ground zero of Western philosophy—it was the Gentile intellectuals and poets who sneered at Paul’s discourse on the resurrection.

It’s the nations of the world who despise God in the apocalypse: “The nations were angry with you, but now the time of your wrath has come.” (Revelation 11:18a)


...In other words, it’s not just the “religious/legalists/fundamentalists” that we may be at odds with.

Here’s the problem: I’m finding myself becoming uncomfortable with how little I’m disliked by people outside of the faith. Okay, I realize I may have some deep interpersonal issues to work out here. And I’m not into creating self-righteous confrontational situations by which I can claim persecution…like your average run-of-the-mill American cult. It’s way too easy to slip into a messianic/persecution complex. Been there, got the t-shirt. Seriously.

But I’m wondering: is my life a fragrance that demands a reaction from different people à la 2 Corinthians 2?—or am I just a nice guy who people generally don’t mind being with? There was a reason that Paul said he was not ashamed of the gospel; it implied that it was something to be scoffed at, to be derided as intellectually silly, as a weakness rather than a position of philosophical strength.

There is a reason why Paul wrote the following words at the risk of appearing super-spiritual or attempting to justify himself: I have faced danger from my own people, the Jews, as well as from the Gentiles. I have faced danger in the cities, in the deserts, and on the stormy seas. And I have faced danger from men who claim to be Christians but are not. I have lived with weariness and pain and sleepless nights. Often I have been hungry and thirsty and have gone without food. Often I have shivered with cold, without enough clothing to keep me warm. (2 Corinthians 11:26b–27 NLT)

Am I so cozy with my life or the culture and so careful to not come off as one of “those kind-of-Christians” that I’m safe as milk? Why am I not disliked by some? I expect to not be liked by some believers for being, well, whatever. Grace feels threatening to some. But where is my interaction with people outside of the Church that causes them to scoff, derisively laugh, or actively oppose the message of the Cross and resurrection? I made fun of people who believed in God before I became a Christian. Where are those who are making fun of me? I’m afraid I’m too insulated and safe in the current zeitgeist of tolerance and acceptance.

The power of the gospel is the Cross…where mercy and judgment meet in space and time. But there is no sense of mercy without a realization of judgment. And somehow, mysteriously, the Cross shouts a more-than-subliminal message of both.

Why don’t people hate me? At least some? It's got me thinking.
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the tree of life: movie of the year?

Okay, something off the beaten blog path for me. This has nothing to do with the weekend.

I can’t quite describe the effect the movie The Tree of Life had on me. I’ve been waiting for it to come out on DVD since it came—and went—fairly quickly at select theatres. I have to admit I was a little reticent; I was afraid it was going to be the millennial generation’s version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sorry, Kubrick fans, but as visually striking as it was in its day, the story and its subliminal themes just didn’t do it for this guy. I find his films too nihilistic, or at least pessimistic, even though 2001 and its closing starchild scene was supposed to be some sort of rebirth. I think. He simply lost me on that one; it felt a little pretentious to me. Still, The Tree of Life seems to be a nod to 2001, borrowing the cinematic feel, philosophical meaning of life questions, a classical music score, and even the same special effects designer.

Here’s the disclaimer: yes, I know the arts are übersubjective and we carbon-based bipeds process them through a complex mix of emotions and tastes at any one moment. At the Cannes Film Festival, the premier drew both applause and boos. A New York Times reviewer gushed: “The sheer beauty of this film is almost overwhelming, but as with other works of religiously minded art, its aesthetic glories are tethered to a humble and exalted purpose, which is to shine the light of the sacred on secular reality.” Others weren’t nearly as kind; Salon dismissed it as “a crazy religious allegory.” It certainly was polarizing.

This one grabbed me in some inexplicable way.

Writer-director and notoriously publicity-shy Terrence Malick is a bit of an acquired taste. His movies are a mashup of philosophical and theological themes. But for me, this one was one of the most insightful presentations of the Bible’s Romans chapter seven sin-struggle I’ve seen…or read.

The movie opens with a quote from Job, the point in the biblical narrative in which God challenges Job’s assumptions of His intentions and character: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth ... when the morning stars sang together?” (Job 38:4,7). The main character deals with a similar Job-like struggle…and I’m sure it wasn’t a screenplay coincidence that his name is Jack O’Brien.

The story is life seen through the eyes of eleven-year-old Jack in a series of flashback memories (Sean Penn plays the grownup version) and life-moment vignettes focusing on the complicated relationship he has with his father (Brad Pitt). His mother represents grace with a quiet authority; the father is the way of nature…the embodiment of Tennyson’s, “…Nature, red in tooth and claw…”.

In the opening scenes, the mother, played by a transcendent Jessica Chastain, narrates in a voice-over, “The nuns taught us there were two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow.” (yes, I'm Wesleyan). This establishes the storyline and moral tug-of-war.

Malick even throws in a visually-overwhelming creation narrative that puts the characters' lives in perspective, reflecting the opening verse from Job. It includes a powerful metaphorical depiction of Jack’s birth. Very moving.

But what made the film fascinating and unique for me was the running internal dialogue Jack has with God. Jack is confused and troubled by his father’s strict parenting and dog-eat-dog view of life and argues with God. There is a gradual awakening of his ability to choose the way of grace or of nature…and Jack seems to feel he is becoming trapped like his own father, in a struggle with good and evil.

Years later, he and his parents receive the news that his younger brother has died. We’re not told how (in director Malick’s real life his younger classical guitar-playing brother—as in the movie—committed suicide). As an adult, Jack appears to be a successful but lost soul. Did he choose his father’s way?

Spoiler alert (though the movie is such a discombobulating visual feast, I’m not sure this matters a whole lot):

At the end of the movie, adult Jack has a sudden vision of being in an arid, desert-like place and sees his younger self in the distance calling for him to follow him (become like a child?). He steps through a standalone doorway (Christ?) and begins to walk toward an endless beach seeing all his family members. His mother, seemingly comforted by two young women (symbolic angels?), narrates, “I give you my son.” In what seems to be a reconciling and redemptive moment, Jack snaps out of it and is back in his current architecture job, with a slight smile.

Prior to this scene, as the family is forced to move from their home, packed into their car looking back at the house they’ve always known, Jack’s mother voice-overs: “The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by.”

Though some found it confusing and meandering at nearly two-and-a-half-hours, there were moments in the movie where I felt strangely connected to Jack and deeply empathetic. I don’t normally experience empathy at that level (my wife Anita jokes that I’m missing the empathy gene).

I found the movie drenched in Christian symbolism, even not-so-subtly quoting from Romans and Job.

Maybe it’s just me, but it was the movie of the year for my money. Uh, all of a $1.49 at Drug Mart. But don’t blame me if you hate it and find yourself scratching your head at the end of it, muttering, “Wha...?”

I loved it.
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desperation, rich mullins...and a million years ago

My friend Beth Lutz sent me a couple of photos from what seems like a million years ago. Beth was Beth Snell before she married my buddy and co-pastor Mark. She sang with an acoustic Christian group way back in the late seventies/early eighties (sorry, Beth) named Zion. Zion was centered around an unknown, piano-hammering young singer-songwriter named Rich Mullins. I was working a minimum wage job downtown in the catacombs of the Public Library and Rich worked a few blocks away in the ticket booth in the Shillito’s parking garage. We’d get together and argue theology—neither one of us really knew much—and wonder why the church had a problem with long hair at the time. He was raised in a conservative religious home, I was raised in a pagan home. Rich was slightly wacky. Maybe that’s what religion does to you, I don’t know. But I think that’s why I liked him.

I had just become a Christian, gotten a civilian job, and had started playing guitar more seriously after being a drummer in bar bands from the time I was fourteen. Remind me to tell you the story sometime of an expletive-ranting bar owner in Kentucky that kept a beer-guzzling live bear in a cage that bit his finger off one night between sets. At the time it seemed, uh, justified somehow. But I digress.

I met another Christian named Paul Niehaus who had a TEAC four-track reel-to-reel tape recorder (I told you this was a long time ago) in his basement with an old upright piano. He and I played guitars together and had started gigging in local coffeehouses in the mid-seventies. At night Rich would come to Paul’s basement and bang furiously on the upright, I’d play my black-oyster pearl Ludwig drums and Paul thumped bass. Paul and I eventually formed an acoustic group with a female singer and female violinist. And then married them. Is music great or what?

Rich formed Zion and then a relative loaned him the money to go to 5th Floor Studios in Cincinnati and record a self-produced album. Rich called and asked if I would play drums on the sessions and of course I said yes. A friend named Tony Ross played bass. Greg McNeilly engineered and went on to engineer all three albums for a band called Prodigal that I had the pleasure of playing with in the early-to-mid-eighties (for some of that retro-80's-blast-from-the-past-rock-goodness, click below...)




Anyway, it was a song from that Zion session called Sing Your Praise to the Lord that made its way to the ears of rising CCM pop star Amy Grant. The rest is early Christian music history.



Rich was signed as songwriter, moved to Nashville and eventually released his own music, later forming and traveling with A Ragamuffin Band. By the early nineties, his songs were picked up by other artists by the boatloads. Awesome God became a signature worship chorus. Rich could have been fairly wealthy, but instead he arranged for a small church he had attended to receive all his money and had them pay him whatever the average income was in America—about $25,000 then. The church gave the rest of the money out to various ministries and needs. Rich never married and started a quasi-monastic order called the “Kid Brothers of St. Frank.” He said he would have been a Catholic monk but was too much of a wimp. When an executive from a record label once asked him if he knew how much money was pouring in from royalties, he simply said, “No…it would just make it that much harder to give away.”

Like most of us, Rich was a complex personality. Deeply desperate for God, a strong sense of justice, more than a little quirky, critically honest and opinionated. Years passed before I saw him again. The last couple of times were at a Bruce Cockburn concert at Bogart’s and then bringing him in to play at the Vineyard on a weekend in the mid-nineties. He died shortly afterward in a tragic car accident on the way to a benefit concert.

In the end, I think it works like this: the more we’re aware of how screwed up we really are, the more desperate we become for Jesus. Maybe it’s the implied message when Jesus forgave the prostitute who washed his feet with her tears: the one who is forgiven much loves much. It certainly creates a desperation for God. We really, really need Him. I mean, who do we think we’re kidding? Perhaps that’s why the Bible says, “The fool has said in his heart: there is no God.” (Ps 14:1)

I think that’s why I absolutely loved Joe Boyd’s message this weekend in the Strong Challenge series. The angle he took with the “Strong Training” segment was the desperation factor: it’s only when we’re really desperate that we get serious about doing anything we can to be near Jesus.

I could use some more of that in my bones.

And I hope there’s a funky old upright piano in the Kingdom Come; it would be good to hear Rich again. He was a desperate man.
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