whose god is my god?

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(Disclaimer: You may draw the following analogy out to other real-life moral challenges. Okay, I warned you.)

It’s only a matter of time and money until child porn is perfectly and realistically computer-generated. There will be some who will hail it as a win for free speech since no child is harmed in its production…and others will mourn it as a sign of a moral collapse.

In the end I think it all depends on who your god is.

Culturally it’s still fairly easy to say that child pornography is immoral. Most find it repugnant. But in the coming years American society will struggle with it for several reasons:

First, we have a love affair with our constitution, particularly freedom of speech. I mean, who really wants the government to define who can say what? I don’t. You don’t. The dilemma is it’s becoming easier to defend constitutional rights and more difficult to define morality. Whose morality? The majority? God’s?—or at least your interpretation of God’s moral laws? In a pluralistic society this gets more complicated. And though some will cry, “You can’t legislate morality”, you’re kidding, right? Don’t we do that everyday with laws that punish anyone who steals or drives thirty-five in a school zone? We believe laws deter bad behavior...or at the very least punishes it.

Second, we have some strong cultural assumptions. For example: what a person does privately—as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else—is nobody’s business, and certainly for those who feel government is infringing more and more in our “personal affairs”. Conservatives and libertarians have a conundrum when they want less government, more constitutionally-driven power, and yet have specific moral imperatives legislated. The constitution is pretty amoral…and if you think power should be decentralized (a la states rights), it’s still an argument of degree: for instance, California is a big state. Someone will still have the power. And if all politics is local, gee, L.A. is pretty humongous…and even Anaheim is no small potatoes. You can get off the grid and make your own tofu, but if there’s more that a few of you on that ponderosa in Montana, some governance structure will develop. It wasn’t pretty in Lord of the Flies.

Third, here comes the issue: what if child porn is created via someone’s graphic card? Years ago the Supreme Court determined, in effect, that child pornography wasn’t criminalized if it was virtual, that is, if no actual children were involved. Apparently, zeroes-and-ones are okay. It should be no surprise that the only moral imperative we seem to have is: “as-long-as-it-doesn’t-hurt-anybody”. Somehow we keep forgetting Somebody in that “anybody”. Uh, like God.

Two years ago, the Court upheld a federal statute criminalizing soliciting or pandering child pornography. But since it had already ruled that virtual child pornography was protected by the constitution, what became illegal two years ago was if the panderer was fraudulently passing off the virtual pornography as real. So underage Sims getting it on is illegal to post if you’re trying to pass it off as real human children. Gee, you think that’ll be a problem as CGI gets more realistic?

Two of the justices dissented. David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg felt their concerns were still not addressed. They didn’t object to making it a crime to mislead others by offering material that actually didn’t exist; that’s merely fraud. We all know that is wrong. But Souter reminded the Court that possession of pornographic images that do not depict real children is constitutionally protected, and offering them should not be a crime. He said, “If the act can effectively eliminate the real-child requirement when a proposal relates to extant material, a class of protected speech will disappear.”

Sheesh. I’ll leave that to the lawyers to parse.

But I know where I have to wrestle with this stuff. In some ways, it’s not just a moral issue for me; it’s a matter of obedience. My God sent His Son to die for me. That’s the bottom line. I was a moral mess, a lonely self-absorbed screwed-up young guy who God found facedown in a “no-one’s-going-to-tell-me-how-to-live” gutter. A myopic mix of bravado and fears. A hot mess of nurture and nature-gone-wild. As the blind man in John 9 remarked while interrogated and harassed by religious leaders, “One thing I do know: I was blind but now I see!” Or at least in the words of Forrest, “I’m not a smart man. But I know what love is.”

My love for God has to be greater than my love for my personal view of life. And oddly, it has to be greater than my love for man. We have to be cautious of turning love into god. God is love…and not the other way around. Anthropomorphizing God into an old man with a long beard is just as silly as nebulously viewing Him as some amorphous force floating around.

But mysteriously, the more I love God, the more deeply I love people. It’s funny: when I think conversely of Jesus’s statement in Luke 7:47, it would read, “He who has been forgiven much, loves much.” The more in touch I am with the extent of my Father’s love for me and the expanse of His forgiveness of me, the more I can legitimately love others. Take away His grace, and I’m left adrift to define love in silly ways.

And so regardless of where the laws waft, I know the God I serve. And I don’t argue anymore with what He describes in His book as to what offends Him, what breaks His heart. If it breaks His, I want it to break mine…regardless if it doesn’t seem to hurt others.

There are numbers of different things that our culture says shouldn’t bother me as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else and done in the privacy of a bedroom. Of course that’s true from a culture-current legal perspective; I wouldn’t want someone telling me what I should or shouldn’t do if I believed it was morally permissible for me. But now I know I have to internalize it and weigh it all with what wounds the heart of God. As I’ve said before, imagine defacing a gorgeous, centuries-old work of art because you didn’t like the way the artist painted the picture, repainting with your own flourishes, how you think it should look, and ignoring the artist’s original design. Try to imagine how the artist would feel.

Before we champion particular behaviors, it might be wise to consider what the Master Artist has to say about those who were painted in His image. I believe we need to think a little more deeply than pub theology.

And much of this will be determined by whose god is your god.
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firestarter safety

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Dallas thinking about the weekend (Firestarters) and what I wish I could have said. Because of our quest for the elusive fifty-five minute celebration (trying to cram in three celebration start times between 9 and 11:45 on Sunday is a challenge), sometimes there simply isn’t time to unpack a particular point. I would have liked to talk a little more about the idea of safety in relationships. It wasn’t critical to the main thrust of the message, but it left some things unsaid.

I mentioned that many of us at VCC came from messy family systems with varieties of dysfunctions that make us nervous about any real depth of relationship. But in this New Family that God was forming, there should be a sense of safety. Otherwise, we can’t admit our failures or shame without fear of judgment or rejection. Without safety, there’s no real intimacy or depth of relationship.

Months ago I was both amused and sad when I got an email with “Bless me, Father…” in the subject line. It began with:

“I have a confession. I have been at the Vineyard for years. I still am not a Republican. Is there a Growth and Healing group for me? I'm being obstinate here, but I was there in the conservative church in the early to mid-60's. The MLK video triggered some flashbacks. I admit I don't understand the attraction of the right wing for evangelicals. I also know that even discussing political issues can painfully divide churches. I don't even admit my political views to my small group, who know more about my dirty secrets than anyone else. My casual friends know I voted for Obama, but my small group leader said they thought it possible that Obama is the Anti-Christ. They really said that, and they’re one of the most caring and sincere people I know.”

Obviously, some tongue-in-cheek, but between the lines is real pain. They went on to write:

“Sometimes hesitate to invite my liberal friends. I still crave acceptance from other people and I'm afraid to leave my particular ‘closet’.”

Regardless of your personal politics, that seems sad to me that they don’t feel safe in their group. As many of you know, the Vineyard works really hard to be apolitical; the staff is a mix of backgrounds, sensitivities and politics. What’s more, because of our high value for recovery ministries and the power of redemptive, restorative and reconciliatory relationships, we deeply understand the need for safety, transparency and vulnerability in order to be whole people. I find it fascinating, though, that because of our politicized and polarized culture, someone can feel free enough to expose their deepest secrets but scared of admitting a particular political slant even in passing…for fear of rejection and reprisal.

Jesus told His disciples that people would know they belonged to Him because of their love for each other. The kicker?—they were a diverse group of personalities with extremely different political views and socio-economic backgrounds. But God’s New Family would reflect His Kingdom…and the evident power of the Holy Spirit to tear down walls that separate us—whether they are walls of ethnicity, race, politics, education, gender or whatever. Or as the apostle Paul would say, In Christ’s family there can be no division into Jew and non-Jew, slave and free, male and female. Among us you are all equal. That is, we are all in a common relationship with Jesus Christ. (Galatians 3:28 Message Version).

And so when we invite outsiders to our gatherings, there is an obvious message that goes beyond words and slogans. Imagine a spiritual family that includes men and women, the wealthy and the under-resourced, Republicans and Democrats, blacks and whites, singles and married, young and old, all broken and bruised…all in the process of healing and reconciliation. What do you think that would communicate? I believe people are longing to belong to a real family.

There was a long history of racism and hostility between Jews and Gentiles in the Roman Empire. It had sociopolitical and religious roots…those are two strikes right away. In the second half of chapter two in Paul’s Ephesian letter, he doesn’t sweep any of this under the rug but fully exposes it. And at the same time, he doesn’t avoid the chosen status the Jews had in their covenant with God, and that those outside of that covenant were truly lost and apart from intimacy with God.

But Paul understands that a new covenant has been made, a covenant that makes the old one obsolete, as the author of Hebrews writes (Hebrews 8:13). God is doing something radical in the human race…and Paul outlines it further in Ephesians 2:

For Christ himself has made peace between us Jews and you Gentiles by making us all one people. He has broken down the wall of hostility that used to separate us. By his death he ended the whole system of Jewish law that excluded the Gentiles. His purpose was to make peace between Jews and Gentiles by creating in himself one new person from the two groups. (Ephesians 2:14–15 New Living Translation)

Safety is critical if we really want to grow as Christ-followers. How are you on the safety scale with others? Are you a safe place, a city of refuge?
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choices

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Maybe in my old age I’m getting wistful, but lately I’ve been thinking a bit about choices I’ve made over the years. And why some of them have been repetitive… good and bad. Especially in light of our series Perfect Takes Practice that Joe Boyd wrapped up this weekend.

Just prior to his death, Moses addressed the nation of Israel. They were about to enter into some real estate that God had promised years before. Moses knew that the only way they would be successful in settling it would be if they continually chose to live for God and follow His ways. Sadly, he also knew prophetically they would not. And so with a philosophical “Whatever...”, he gives them a simple encouragement regarding their choices:

“… I have set before you life or death, blessing or curse. Oh, that you would choose life; that you and your children might live! Choose to love the Lord your God and to obey him and to cling to him, for he is your life and the length of your days.” Deuteronomy 30:19, 20 Living Bible

A few verses earlier he put it even more succinctly. To paraphrase, “Because you are made in God’s image, you have this remarkable ability to choose between life and prosperity or death and destruction.” Living our lives for God and the resulting wholeness is a continual string of choices. Moses is simply saying that a full life is largely about choices.

C. S. Lewis made a classic comment about this in his little book Mere Christianity that has stuck with me for decades:

“…every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”

With that in mind, consider the absolutely PC-less comment Jesus made to a hurting man in Jerusalem:

Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for a feast of the Jews. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda (Bethesda means “the house of kindness”) and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, "Do you want to get well?" John 5:1-6.

Excuse me, but shouldn’t that have been obvious? Really? After all, wasn’t the man at the “healing waters” of the House of Kindness?

Get the picture: There could have been hundreds of people lying about this natural spring waiting to be healed. The rumor was that the water rippled ever so often when a supernatural being touched it…and the first ones in would get healed. When Jesus arrived, he headed for one person in particular, a man disabled for nearly forty years. His muscles would have atrophied to the bone. It’s obvious what’s wrong, but there was something deeper. And so Jesus gets to the core of the problem with a simple question: “Do you want to get well?” There is a flash of divine psychoanalysis. “You need to be whole. Do you want to be whole?”

As harsh as this may sound, many of us have problems that we don’t want to get rid of. There are varieties of Biblical ways to get rid of them: restitution, forgiveness, confession, repentance and so on. All of them require being painfully honest. I feel on a regular basis that God asks me, “Do you really want to get well?” There are those of us who will not—do not want—to be healed of our emotional stuff. Our identity may be wrapped up in our problem. “I have a right to feel like this…this person hurt me deeply…this employer stiffed me…” It gives us an excuse for certain behaviors. Some of us would have very little to talk about if it wasn’t for it.

When I was a little kid, if I got sick enough to stay home from school, mom had a routine. For some reason, Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and a laxative were always involved. It didn’t matter if you fell off the playground slide and your collarbone poked through your skin, you had to take laxative. For mom, it was like “digestive bloodletting”. But she also had this wonderful tradition of going to the corner drugstore and buying a comic book for me to read while she worked if I was sick at home. Sometimes I’d just act sick to get a new comic book, in spite of the laxative.

For some of us, that becomes a way of life. A pattern for identity that we carry throughout our adult lives. I’ve learned there’s always a question whispered behind the choices I make. And those questions reveal more about the Real Me and the choices I make than anything else. Further, those questions expose the depth of wholeness I actually desire with my Father.

And despite how we may want to redefine heaven and hell, it seems they still have more to do with our choices than we dare to admit.

I think many of us would find it easier to blame God.
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so why didn’t you talk about divorce?

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Although this series has been an overview of the Sermon on the Mount as it relates to the kingdom of God, there are some specific lines in Jesus’s message that provoke more than a little concern. One of them is his comment about divorce. There was no way to talk about that without spending an entire weekend (at least) on the subject and that would have sidetracked the main point of this particular series.

The stickler verse is this:

“It has been said, ‘Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.’? But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.” (Matthew 5:31–32) Seems obvious, right? But actually, Bible scholars are all over the map on this issue of divorce and remarriage. I think if we read some key passages in context, it makes a lot more sense. There’s no way you can walk through this minefield without making somebody mad. I’ve been accused of being too soft on this by some and too dogmatic by others.

One of the most oft-stated points made by conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists is this: God hates divorce. In a well-quoted passage in Malachi 2, it reads: “I hate divorce,” says the Lord God of Israel… “ Malachi 2:16a. Please notice He didn’t say He hated divorced people. You might say to your kids, “I hate lying! I don’t like it when you lie to me!” But that doesn’t mean you hate your kids, it simply means you hate lying.

Now let me give you a big shocker you never hear preachers talk about: God Himself is divorced. At a point in Israel’s history, He became so angry with Israel’s unfaithfulness to Him, with their lusting after other lovers, other gods, other attractions to give themselves to, that He tells Jeremiah, “I gave faithless Israel her certificate of divorce and sent her away because of all her adulteries…” Jeremiah 3:8a.

Are those scriptures at odds with each other?

Let’s start from the beginning. First, divorce and permission to remarry was not an issue under the Law of Moses—they were assumed one and the same. It reads in Deuteronomy 24: “Suppose a man marries a woman but later discovers something about her that is shameful. So he writes her a letter (or certificate) of divorce, gives it to her, and sends her away. If she then leaves and marries another man and the second husband also divorces her or dies, the former husband may not marry her again, for she has been defiled. Deuteronomy 24:1-4a (New Living Translation).

A letter of divorce meant that the marriage was a complete dissolution and remarriage was a part of the package. It was assumed there would be a remarriage. There was no forbidding of remarriage except in only one case: after marrying a second husband, a woman could not remarry her first husband if she divorced again (Uh, that’s not a problem for most divorced couples I know…). That was the only law against remarriage for divorced people. So when Paul, in a controversial passage in Romans 7, talks about a woman being bound to her husband as long as he lived, that she was not released unless he died, he was well aware of the Mosaic Law. As a matter of fact, he writes “I am speaking to those who know the law...” He was not talking about the reality of legal divorce and remarriage—he’s talking about a woman who is married and then marries another man while still married to the first. No one in Israel would call a legally divorced, remarried man or woman an adulterer; that was unheard of.

Now the tricky issue under Mosaic Law was defining the cause for divorce—ambiguously described as the wife “having found no favor in his eyes,” because he found “something unclean about her.” The interpretation of unclean could be anything from her being a bad housekeeper, to talking too loudly in her house, to the husband just finding someone prettier. This loose interpretation is the reason Jesus is cornered by some Pharisees in Matthew 19 and posed with the question “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause at all?”

Remember, the question is not whether they can remarry; that’s not the issue--but on what grounds can they legally divorce? In Jesus’s time there were two debating schools of thought: one camp centered around Rabbi Hillel (who lived about a hundred years before Christ). He said you could divorce for any cause.

The other school was Rabbi Shammai who said only for fornication. This was a hotly debated topic...and divorce was rampant in Palestine. Remember the woman at the well who had been married five times? She was not the exception of that culture. He says to her “Go get your husband.” She says, “I don’t have one” and He prophetically responds with “Correct! Matter of fact, you’ve had five husbands and you’re not married to the guy you’re shacking up with now.” He seemed to recognized the legality of the fact that she had been married to five husbands and was now with a man who was not her husband.

When Matthew records this in chapter 5, he puts it in a context that gives us the key to understanding this. In Matthew 5 (and please read the whole chapter to get this), Jesus compares the Law of Moses to a higher calling: life in Him and the “Now-and-Not-Yet Kingdom-lifestyle”. Remember, Jesus said He didn’t come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.

He was raising the stakes of what it meant to live under a Law of Love. Jesus was speaking in a style I call comparative hyperbole. He says “You have heard that it was said…” . . . “But I say…” (Matthew 5:21 to 43). He then uses a rhetorical overstatement to make his point in comparison to the Law of Moses—which was considered the standard for righteousness. He raises what real holiness would look like—it had more to do with heart motives than behaviors.

Again, Jesus said He didn’t come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it—and the law plainly allowed for divorce and remarriage. Let’s put one other thing into this mix: for any of you who have looked at divorced and remarried people as some second-class citizens of the Kingdom, I can only hope that you have never called anyone a jerk, because you’re guilty of hell, according to Jesus just a few verses earlier in Matthew 5. Someone cuts you off the expressway and you think they’re a dipstick, dust off your Triptik to hell. Or if you’ve ever been angry with a relative, you’ve just committed murder. Or I certainly hope I that you’ve never even thought about someone in a sexual way—you’ve already committed adultery. And adulterers and murderers are put to death under the laws of Moses. Or if for any reason you’ve lusted after something, make sure you pluck your right eye out. Or if you ever have to go to court and get slapped with a lawsuit, please give them a lot more money than they sue you for.

That’s the context that Jesus speaks on divorce here.

In those passages, Jesus is raising the stakes for the ideal marriage. Again, catch the overdriven language of what He’s saying: call somebody a jerk, you go to hell. Divorce your wife, you make her and yourself commit adultery. He ends this chapter with “Be perfect, just like your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Quick reality check: by a show of hands, how many of you blog-readers are perfect? Thank you. That is why we need Jesus Christ. Jesus is saying: those who live in perfect love will never divorce. And…they will never call someone a fool, they will never even glance at someone lustfully, they will never say “yes” when they’re not sure, and they will always love their enemies. They will always be perfect.

“Dave, you’re being sarcastic; are you saying don’t pay any attention to this stuff?—it’s not possible to live like that so don’t even mess with it?” Of course not. These are the words of God in the flesh. I’d better listen to them. I must abide in Jesus to walk in love. But with the understanding that if I’m honest I will more than likely fail, and will once again fall upon the grace of the Lord Jesus. If He is not able to forgive, then I am not able to live. That’s the reality.

Jesus is not just placing restrictions on people; Jesus takes us higher to the perfect law of love. Instead of asking “What’s the bottom line for divorce?” we should be asking “What’s the real power and significance of marriage?”

God designed marriage to be the most intimate human relationship possible. You’ve probably heard Christian teachers say, and I have said it myself, that “divorce is not in my vocabulary.” But let’s get real. The truth is, none of us went to the altar with divorce in our minds; that was an issue for other people who were “not in love like us.”

I’ve written these words before, but “God designed marriage to be the most intimate friendship imaginable. When the New Testament speaks of a man cleaving to his wife, it’s based on the same Greek word used for glue. It is the bringing together of two substances to make a new one. Jesus is saying that we need to enter this covenant with a measure of awe, a reverent fear and responsibility to God. The reason why we get married with clergy represented is because we are witnessing before God and asking Him to join us together and the heavyweight words that He speaks are ‘If I join you together, then don’t let any mere mortal tear you asunder’.”

The Apostle Paul writes: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. Ephesians 5:31-32.

Did you read between the lines there?—marriage has an incredible mission. It becomes the visible representation of the kind of intimacy and love Jesus desires for His bride—the Church. Marriage is the only thing on the planet that comes close to picturing the power, beauty and intimacy of God’s covenant with His followers. Get this and you’ll never see it the same again: Marriage is bigger than the personal fulfillment it should bring to each other. It has a task and a vision beyond that.

The world is looking for models of love and longevity and integrity. It is important to me to make sure my marriage is healthy because many people would be affected by its failure: not just me, not just my wife, not just my kids. And it’s not just so it looks good—that’s hypocritical. But whether it is good.

When you have invested your life in the Kingdom of God, when Jesus becomes the center of your life, everything takes on a higher significance. If your marriage doesn’t have a vision bigger than itself, you’re bound for trouble. That is why the Bible says it’s so critical that we marry other passionate followers of Jesus, that we’re not yoked with unbelievers. It’s saying: If you love Jesus, marry someone else who loves Him more than you do and is completely surrendered to Him. Otherwise there is no common vision other that trying to make each other happy. That’s not big enough to last.

The problem is: we live in a world of fallen creatures, with painful histories and emotional baggage, and trickiest of all, free will. But remember: God’s grace is very wide. I only know of one unforgivable sin, and this one isn’t it. We are the “not-yet-together” people. By faith we receive the catalytic and dynamic power of God, but we’re transparent about that process.
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perfect takes practice

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“But you are to be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” ~Jesus

In this series we began called Perfect Takes Practice, I mentioned an idea that Malcolm Gladwell posits in his fascinating book, Outliers: The Story of Success. He upsets the typical ways we think how success happens, from culture to education to race to social class. In the book, Gladwell introduces the 10,000 Hours Rule. He writes of a study done at an elite music university in Berlin by a psychologist named Ericsson.

Ericsson divided all of the violin students into three groups. The first group were the “stars”…those who had the potential to become world-class soloists. The second group was judged to be merely “good” and in the third were students who never intended to become professionals but wanted to become music teachers in the public schools.

Every student had started learning at the same age, about five years old. They all practiced around the same amount of hours. Then Gladwell writes:

“But when the students were around the age of eight, real difference started to emerge. The students who would end up the best in their class began to practice more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight hours a week by age twelve, sixteen hours a week by age fourteen, and up and up, until by the age of twenty they were practicing—that is, purposefully and single-mindedly playing their instruments with the intent to get better—well over thirty hours a week. In fact, by the age of twenty, the elite performers had each totaled ten thousand hours of practice. By contrast, the merely good students had totaled eight thousand hours, and the future music teachers had totaled just over four thousand hours.”

They did the same research with pianists as well. Same result. Neurologist Daniel Levitin found the same thing with “…basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters . . . chess players, (and) master criminals.” It takes an average of 10,000 hours for the brain “to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

Fascinating.

Gladwell even uses the Beatles as an example. By the time they came to America back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, they had played in the gritty strip clubs of Hamburg, Germany seven days a week, eight hours a night, and two-hundred-seventy nights in just a year-and-a-half.

In an interview before he died, John Lennon said, “In Liverpool, we’d only ever done one-hour (shows), and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing.”

Before they became successful in America, they had been playing together for seven years and “performed live an estimated twelve hundred times.” Most bands never do that their entire careers.

They hit the 10,000 Hours Rule. Practice, practice, practice.

What we discover in the Matthew 5-7 is the practice of surrendering to the King and His Kingdom-way of living. As a follower of Jesus I’ve learned that God is way more interested in my heart than my GPS location—where I’m “supposed to be” and “supposed to be doing”. God probes my core motivations to force me to admit if I’m living by the “dog-eat-dog, me-first, power-at-all-cost, I have to be right, recognized and rewarded” way of living in this world…or if I’m riding the first wave of this ocean of faith, hope and love that is pouring over the planet from God: the Kingdom Come.

What would happen if we began to actually practice Matthew 5-7? What if we fully became citizens of this new kingdom? What would happen if after 10,000 hours of following Jesus in the way He describes, we discovered that this is more that “good advice”? Would that make us more complete, perfect in terms of what God is doing in us in the moment?

This is light years past average day-to-day living. It is here that Jesus exposes the difference between people who say they love God, and people who really love God and know Him. I'm forced once again to face how my actions reveal my heart or God's heart.

Take mercy, for instance, as outlined in the Sermon on the Mount.

Expressing mercy is the ultimate risk-taking venture—X games for the soul. C. S. Lewis wrote that “Pilate (the Roman governor who condemned Jesus to crucifixion) was merciful till it became risky.” It would be nice if Jesus would have given us a select group of people to be merciful to…but He doesn't leave us that luxury. He simply says, “Love your enemies…and do good to them.”

I believe that if we were to actually practice what Jesus says, our personalities would begin a transformation. And by the way, Jesus didn't preface this with any exceptions. He didn't say, “I know some of you have come from dysfunctional families, so just do the best you can.” He actually tells them to be “complete, or perfected, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Teleios is the Greek word meaning completeness, wholeness, perfection—like God. It's not restrictive; rather, it’s liberating…it gives us life. If we come from dysfunctional backgrounds (and who hasn’t?), it is all the more reason to live this life-giving challenge. If I want to be well, I must.

Perfect takes practice.

“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.” (Matthew 7:24)

where's bloggo?

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Hello blog. I’ve been away for awhile. Okay, a long, long while.

I think I‘ve been going through one of my deconstruction phases where I question how valuable certain activities are. But instead of just questioning, I shut down for a while. Ditto for Facebook.

Back in the day when I actually used paper (I’ve been nearly paperless for years; my last holdout was books. After getting a Kindle 2 last year, I haven’t bought a tree-based book since; magazines are still an issue due to a graphic-geekness addiction I can’t shake off. Give me two more iterations of iPads, and I’ll be a good little consumer), I would periodically end up with neatly ordered piles of papers on my desk like mini-skyscrapers. I had a couple of filing cabinets, but they were filled. There was an intuitive methodology to my stacks, but it had one major flaw: I’m a neat-freak when it comes to workspace. Clutter distracts me. It paralyzes me. I can’t explain how it disrupts my mental feng shui. For me, it feels exactly like trying to sleep when I have a dozen issues swirling around in my head that have to be dealt with…and the only way I can sleep—and by the way, prayer doesn’t help me—is to actually get out of bed, flip my Macbook on, and exorcise them to my “to do” list. The insomnia mysteriously fades away.

Anyway, one day in utter frustration because of the piles on my desk, I retrieved a huge shopping bag, placed it on the floor at one end of my desk, and with a simple sweep of my arm, pushed everything over the edge into the bag and carried it to the trash. I felt liberated. Free.

Obviously there are some flaws to this system. Duh.

But my theory was, if no one screamed within the next week or so, it must not have been that important. I even had a scriptural basis for my action:

Yet when he heard that Lazarus was sick, (Jesus) stayed where he was two more days. . . . On his arrival, Jesus found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. (John 11:6, 17 NIV)

Okay, so it’s a different context…and there was a warrant out for Him in Jerusalem…plus He’s the Son of God and already said this was going to express the glory of God in the end. But gee, other than that, He seemed to take an unhurried, uncluttered approach to the whole thing. He didn’t seem frantic and overloaded. So maybe it’s a weak scriptural position, but it did make me feel better.

Anyway, no one screamed…and I developed a new way of regularly shaking the proverbial Etch-A-Sketch upside-down. It was the Workman Shopping Bag Office Management System®. Stephen Covey, step aside; a new sheriff’s in town: I discovered the eighth habit.

And I felt better.

That was many moons ago. But now we live in this fabulous world of zeroes-and-ones and laptops. After developing a simple but effective virtual filing system and demanding that I don’t want anything given or sent to me if it’s not digitized, I have achieved a Zen-like state of clutterlessness. And, of course, I regularly back up, both at home and at my office. And don’t even get me started on the beauty of various search functions.

Anyway, part of being away was a wonderment if I was a contributor to The Clutter…you know, that seemingly endless stream of information and chatter that batters us daily. So when I shut down my little blog, nary a scream was heard. Okay, one query…to which I embarrassingly didn’t respond. But I wondered if my little contribution to the blogosphere was just creating a pile on someone else’s virtual desktop or, even more inwardly-focused, if it was just adding another pile to mine.

I’m honestly not fishing for affirmation here. Really.

Here’s what I’m struggling with: it’s not just the clutter, it’s the dilemma of choosing what to look at. I think the most difficult thing we swim in daily without an awareness of the wetness is the innumerable little choices we make every hour. When my friend Emmanuel first came to America from Jos, Nigeria, he was paralyzed the first time he walked into a supermarket to simply buy some tea, facing shelf after shelf of selections and types of teas. He said it took him weeks to get the courage to go back. Simply listening to music on my iTunes requires effort to choose from the hundreds of artists there; and my collection is miniscule compared to my friends. I think there’s a reason why twenty-somethings are being stereotyped as non-committal—perhaps they have been enculturated, immersed and overwhelmed in a tsunami of choices and don’t even realize they’re keeping their options open simply because they can. It’s the water they swim in.

The hot new algorithmic engines are the software services that make choices for you based on your history of surfing and selections. Netflix recommends movies to me. Google advises me on news stories. Pandora chooses my radio listening. Amazon recommends products. Kindle offers books based on my likings. YouTube suggests videos. In The Art of Choosing, author Sheena Iyengar writes that fifteen years ago there were a half-million consumer goods for sale in America. Today, Amazon itself offers twenty-four million.

Think of a person in the first century. Heck, even one just a hundred years ago. The exponential increase in the amount of information that necessitates choice-making is bewildering. It’s been estimated that a single issue of the New York Times contains more information than a seventeenth-century Englishman would have in a lifetime. I think it hugely impacts our culture’s approach to choosing to follow Jesus; it’s obvious how critical the wooing of the Holy Spirit is in that process.

Anyway, if you’re still reading this, I’m actually a bit discombobulated that you would choose to do that. I’m still wrestling with whether I want to keep adding to the pile…and if I'm part of the solution or part of the problem.

How do you handle The Noise?
a

jubilee twenty-ten

This weekend we launched the Jubilee 2010 series. We’ve come to the end of our three-year pledges for the Luke 4 Challenge.

Things have been going remarkably well…and believe it or not, that usually makes me nervous. I’m the type of personality that thinks, as my mom in Kentucky used to say, “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch”. Okay, so it’s not like we’re hatching anything, but I think I tend to get a little concerned when things are going well. Sheesh. Chock it up as another one of my dysfunctions.

What’s more, I tend to get nervous about celebrating things. It’s part of a “small town”-mentality that’s imprinted growing up in the Mayberry-world of Augusta, Kentucky: don’t get all uppity. And don’t blow your own horn. That would be okay if you knew how to play a horn, but as we’ve said around VCC for years, “We’re not that smart. This has to be God.”

In the six Easter celebrations, we had over 10,300 people show up. But better, about 1200 of them decided to recommit their lives to Jesus and, along with Discoveryland, about 300 more gave their hearts to Jesus for the first time. That’s pretty amazing. Then the following weekend Wess Stafford spoke. Wess is the president of Compassion International and spoke at the Leadership Summit last year. His team brought some children to sponsor and nearly six-hundred were picked up. That’s fairly amazing too.

Things are going, uh, swimmingly. So I’m nervous.

And now we’ve come to the time when we should celebrate the outcomes of the Luke 4 Challenge. The Healing Center has only been opened less than two years and yet offering forty unique services for over three-thousand people a month through five-hundred volunteers and a dozen staff members. Or the Student Union experiencing sixty-percent growth with six-hundred students each week and soon to open one of the largest indoor skate parks within a hundred miles. Or the sixty-five wells drilled around Jos, Nigeria, providing clean accessible water for over 35,000 people. Only God can pull this stuff off. And I’m pretty sure it’s not because of some “great faith” on our part.

But even listing these things seems weird, no matter how simply intended for Vineyard folks to be able to celebrate. It can feel like “blowing your own horn”. I’ve long felt the tension between these two verses:

“Take care! Don’t do your good deeds publicly, to be admired, because then you will lose the reward from your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 6:1)…and…“In the same way, let your good deeds shine out for all to see, so that everyone will praise your heavenly Father.” (Matthew 5:16 NLT)

Yeah, I can exegete them and get some clarity, but these verses slice deep into our psyches and motivations. Tricky stuff. Even writing about this feels odd.

But I think the thing I do like to celebrate is when a creative idea of grace pops up.

At the close of the Luke 4 Challenge, it turns out we ended with about a four-million-dollar gap. Though 12.8 million was pledged, the recession that soon followed wiped a number of families out, many lost their jobs and others saw their income shrink significantly. At this point, a little over ten million came in (wow!), but with an 11% overrun in projected cost, we find ourselves in a gap.

So as we launched into the celebration of Jubilee 2010, thrilled with what God has done, we sensed Him leading us this way: the Jubilee in Israel (intended to be celebrated every fifty years) was an outrageous act of justice and mercy—all land was given back to the original owners, all debts were forgiven and all slaves were set free. Or as it says in Leviticus 25:11: proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants (that verse is actually inscribed on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia).

And that’s what got us: let’s totally forgive anyone’s Luke 4 Challenge debt. Here’s what I said in the celebration:

“If you were one of those folks who weren’t able to complete your Luke 4 Challenge commitment—no matter what the reason was—I want you to know that all sense of indebtedness is wiped away. It’s okay. Really. You’re free from it, no kidding. I want you to be able to really celebrate without any sense of guilt or condemnation or whatever. Okay? I’m serious. It’s the Jubilee at the Vineyard: you are free from your pledge; it’s all expunged. No one is second-guessing you. I want you to be able to walk in here with absolutely no guilt and just have fun in celebrating what’s happened: Guilt-free. Is that clear or do I need to say it again? It’s Jubilee 2010!”

I had numbers of people Facebook me and tell me how liberating that was. One woman stopped me between celebrations and started crying; she went through a divorce two years ago and was unable to complete her pledge. She told me she felt guilty every time we did a Luke 4 update. She wanted to celebrate but felt ashamed and like a failure. Then she asked me, “Did you really mean what you said?”


Absolutely.

And since about two-thousand people have come to VCC after we started the Luke 4 Challenge, we’re praying that many will pick up the slack…as well as folks who didn’t jump in the first time and veterans who want to be part of it again. New pledges just through the end of 2010 and then we’re over. I want everyone to have the opportunity to be a part of something bigger than themselves.

I love real freedom. And I especially love extending it to others.

It’s Jubilee 2010. Let’s party in Graceland!

easter at the vineyard

You don't want to miss this.



Bring some friends who are wrestling with the “God-question”; I guarantee they'll have some great conversation with you later. Then just listen and say, “All I know is that Jesus changed my life. Hang with us for awhile and see for yourself.”



Celebrations are on Saturday at 5 and 6:30pm, Sunday at 8:45, 10:15, 11:45am and 1:15pm.



It's going to be awesome...because many, many people will make the choice to follow Jesus.



And for a quieter, more contemplative time, join us for our Good Friday Evening on April 2 at 7pm. Joe Boyd will be creatively telling us the story as we share in communion together.



Can't wait to see you! 


between two kingdoms

I’m so proud of Joe. His first book, Between Two Kingdoms, was just released. Even though he had given me a pdf earlier, there’s something about holding an actual book (with a very cool cover) when you’re reading a fantasy novel, so I just finished it last night.

For those of you who haven’t met Joe, he’s the real deal. Over the last two-and-a-half years, we’ve become fast friends…and I can’t imagine doing ministry without him. With that, I’d like to give my ringing endorsement of BTK:

Joe Boyd has written a page-turner in this fast-paced fantasy of a Dark Prince’s shadowy rule over a land where the True King is slowly being forgotten and usurped. With masterful storytelling and deft cliffhangers closing each chapter, readers are easily drawn into this sharply-imagined novel. A clever plot device poses the inhabitants of the real Prince’s Upper Kingdom as eternally seven-years old, making their risky life-and-death mission into the Lower Kingdom a more powerful allegory. Lovers of fantasies from C. S. Lewis to J. K. Rowling rejoice: a new author has delivered the goods! And with a parable that will rattle your view of “real” life.

There you have it. And have fun devouring Joe’s book.

the vineyard

I’m sitting in a hotel room in San Antonio thinking about my tribe. I’m here because of a national Vineyard leadership gathering. I would guess that most people who attend Vineyard Community Church in Cincinnati aren’t all that aware we’re part of a larger community of churches called Vineyard USA, a movement of about six-hundred churches. I think I find an element of safety and accountability in being a part of something more than just an association of churches. Don’t get me wrong: I totally love the idea of associations of like-minded churches who are similar in mission and vision.

But something’s missing in that.

I’m trying to think through the role of authority in ecclesiology beyond the local church. It wasn’t always easy for me to even acquiesce to local church authority structures. Being an aging baby boomer who wore black arm bands in high school to express solidarity against the Vietnam war (I ended up with a high number in the draft lottery) and who argued with the school board to repeal its ‘no hair touching the collar” dress code (we won), I struggled with authority and the often myopic (in my young eyes) stances of leaders.

Then I became a believer. And I really began a transformation in my thinking.

Once you surrender your will to God, there is no question of who has the authority: He’s got it all. But that also plays out in the Church, Christ’s body. An ecclesiological governance was so developed in the early church that the writer of Hebrews insists:

Have confidence in your leaders and submit to their authority, because they keep watch over you as those who must give an account. Do this so that their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no benefit to you. (Hebrews 13:17 TNIV)

Even more so, Paul asserts his own authority throughout his letters to different pastors. His instructions to Timothy and Titus have more than a simple mentoring feel to them. He instructs Titus to appoint pastors for local churches in Crete, implying levels of a leadership hierarchy across the whole Church. But in our American Protestant cultures, we are fiercely independent and autonomous.

In the end, I find myself wanting to be in systems of leadership…and I find it difficult to believe we can have accountability in leadership without real authority structures. I may not totally agree with everything my tribe does, but it seems healthy to learn to live out submission in “real life” beyond the spiritualized idea of “just me and Jesus”. And it seems disingenuous that we senior pastors want that in our local church but have little desire for it in our relationships with larger church systems and relationships.

I think the Roman Catholics got it right on this one.

real freedom

It's not too late to get in a FREE* group...or form your own. Easy enough to do online: just click here.

Processing with some other people what God is going to do in you through this journey is crucial. The free-est person who ever walked on this dustball of a planet, promises freedom to all who will follow Him. What does that mean to you? What does it mean to your friends and the people who are taking this journey with you? In expressing our vulnerability we give grace to others. Let’s walk it together.

i'm listening

Sorry, but this doesn’t have anything to do with the weekend. And it’s a bit long. Put your feet up…but not if you’re at work.

When C. S. Lewis’ wife died, he kept a journal of the dark world his heart and mind were thrust into. It was first published under a pseudonym. After his death three years later, A Grief Observed was released with his name. It was revealing. The Great Apologist of Christianity was adrift, unmoored by his emotions, swept along currents that caused him to question all that had anchored his life. He opens with these vulnerable words:

“No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.”

He would later expose his most unnerving thought:

“Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away.”

As time passed, Lewis rediscovered the presence of God. Not in a supernatural blast of power, but as his soul eventually quieted, the peace of God slipped in almost unnoticed at first.

I can’t say enough about how profound the latest blog post from Angie Matthews is. Angie is the wife of Charlie Matthews who suddenly passed away after acute respiratory failure. My friend Charlie was only in his thirties and excited about leading the Mason Vineyard on the north side of Cincinnati. Angie and her two kids are forging their way through a brave new world.

Here’s the tough thing for many of us Americans to process, yet it shouts out through all of scripture: Suffering, regardless of how it comes or through whom it comes or even why it comes, does something in us that nothing else can. It reorients us to another level of truth. Call it unfair, discriminating or cruel, but suffering can have an effect that nothing else can.

I know an older, deeply devoted believer who can be righteously indignant, sometimes prophetic, sometimes moralistic, sometimes difficult to be around because how easily they can dismiss others, perhaps understandably so at times (remember when the psalmist is so angered at the injustice and cruelty of those persecuting his own people that he screams, “How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones against the rock”?). But when this person is going through difficult times, interestingly they become softer, less judgmental, and though noticeably unsure of the depth of their faith, more merciful and gracious to others. As an observer of human nature, it’s absolutely fascinating to me.

Anyway, Angie’s slant on truth is beautifully insightful. Listen to a piece of it:

“Perhaps life is not so much an education in the truth, as if learning was the primary activity, but more a gradual acclimation to the truth, contingent on acceptance and sacrifice. Each experience is an opportunity (and option) to gradually focus our vision, such that the line between what is acceptable and unacceptable given the truth is easier to discern. That is not to say that the particulars of life are ever black and white, or that there is always one most right choice in the complex scenarios in which we find ourselves. However, it does seem to apply to how we live, what we value, and to the purpose we pursue…”

“…Suppose my husband dies despite the pleading prayers of hundreds of God’s people. Suppose my kids must grow up without their father. Suppose all my plans for the future must be rewritten. Suppose I feel lost and alone, disappointed, discouraged. Suppose I don’t want to get up, day after day, and face a reality I did not choose. Suppose I do not understand any of it- nor is any explanation likely forthcoming. I frantically look for some gray area to which I can retreat and feel justified in my anger and despair. How can I be sure God is with me? I can’t know that redemption will come. Maybe I was wrong about God. Maybe I am wrong about a lot of things. Maybe I am a fool to think that there is more to this than meets the eye.

“But then I blink back the tears and try to make out the truth again. It was there before, somewhere in this mess it is still here. The fuzzy edges retreat a little. I see I am no longer hiding in a gray area, but standing quite clearly outside the truth. I could cross my eyes, blur my vision, ignore the truth and stay right where I am. Otherwise I have to get moving, headed in the right direction, back toward the truth. Why are my feet so reluctant to move? Why is it so much more appealing to lay down, close my eyes, and sleep? Am I afraid that making this choice now will deny me the option of blaming God should similar, or far worse, circumstances befall me in the future? Yes. Maybe if I hold that little bit back from God (stay just in the edge of the gray) He will think twice about allowing more tragedy and potentially losing me for good. Maybe I can manipulate Him into protecting me. Maybe I am in control. Maybe I know best.

“Maybe I’m a fool after all.”

While few among us would choose to suffer, what we do when—not if—suffering happens will either cause us to surrender to shallowness or give our souls more depth. And I suspect that depth is never to be hoarded. I, for one, am going to lean into listening when someone who deeply loves Jesus finds herself on a desert journey and is willing to reflect on it. Sometimes I just prattle or shut down when I am hurting; but others among us reflect and thus change the worlds of those who listen.

I’m listening.

Angie Matthews' blog is here.

what would paul do?

Okay, I know, I know. It creeps me out too. But it's difficult to overlook Paul in the roll call of tour guides for the spiritual destiny of this planet.

Paul could have easily developed his own personality cult. Hands down. Instead, it drove him crazy when people said, “I follow Apollos…I follow Paul”. I have a feeling that some televangelists and Christian personalities with grandiose organizations named after themselves—“The So-and-So International Ministry”—would cause Paul embarrassment for the Body of Christ. And while no single personality so shaped the embryonic theology and ecclesiology of the Church, Paul consistently pointed to Jesus as the One deserving focus and worship, even giving his own body for Him…after having it beaten and abused for decades. It’s as if the reward he personally experienced was greater than any debt he felt owed to the One who gave His body for him. At times self-deprecating, maddening and puzzling, it’s hard to ignore the spiritual chutzpah and risk it took to write to the contentious Corinthian church, “Imitate me…just as I also imitate Christ.”

It’s a little sad seeing this current series end. This series came out of a planning season a year ago. It’s necessary for us to chart out series that far in advance so that in an increasingly complex multilayered staff we can plan to take advantage of options and next steps to get the most bang for the buck. And even with spending fourteen weeks in Acts (not counting the Christmas break), Paul’s journeys warrant more attention. But time marches on and we have other issues to cover.

Though there is one overarching thing it’s left me with.

A couple of times in my pastoring VCC I’ve gone on multiple-weeks fasts. I’m not a “fast-er” by nature (uh, that’s dumb…who is?). I like to eat. No, love to eat. I remember once when I felt God wanted us to do a series on the poor for six weeks. I was scared silly, convinced that we’d run everyone off. Who wants to come to church to get depressed and feel guilty? That’s what families are for. I’m just kidding. Sort of.

Regardless, it’s nearly always good advice to do the thing that you at least think God told you to do, if your heart is in a healthy place. And so we launched into a six-week series on poverty with my friend Andy Ransdell (now leading LifePoint Vineyard in Monroe, Ohio) sharing the teaching duties. As we began, I sensed God wanting me to fast. And so for three weeks I had zero food, just water, tea and watered-down orange juice; I was—er, am—too cheap to buy gallons of it, and I was drinking a lot of fluids. It was at the end of that series that we introduced the Healing Center concept.

A year later we started the Luke 4 Challenge to raise millions of dollars to create the Healing Center, the Student Union and the water project in Jos, Nigeria. Once again I felt compelled to fast. When I told my wife, she asked, “For how long?” I told her I think until God says to stop. Little did I know it would last over three weeks of no food at all. On the Sunday we had the commitments come in, Anita and I headed to Nashville after the last celebration to see our daughter…and I felt I was done. We stopped at a Frisch’s in Louisville and I had my first food: a bowl of vegetable soup.

In these two cases, I fasted because of two things: I was desperate to see God move at VCC…and I was passionate about what we were doing.

In Acts 23, we find this same kind of desperation and passion applied…but in a dark way:

The next morning the Jews formed a conspiracy and bound themselves with an oath not to eat or drink until they had killed Paul. More than forty men were involved in this plot. They went to the chief priests and elders and said, "We have taken a solemn oath not to eat anything until we have killed Paul. Now then, you and the Sanhedrin petition the commander to bring him before you on the pretext of wanting more accurate information about his case. We are ready to kill him before he gets here."

Can you imagine having forty men strategizing your murder? And so determined and passionate about it that they vow to fast until the job is done? Whoa. Religion can do some strange things…as we know in our current global troubles. And any leader that has a contract on him is doing something different. Just reading about that event in Paul’s life causes me to think about my own in different ways, in more outward-focused ways. Earlier while in Caesarea, a legit prophet takes Paul’s belt, ties his own hands and feet with it and says, “The Holy Spirit says, if you go to Jerusalem, the owner of this belt will be tied up and handed over to the Gentiles.” The people there saw this and pleaded with Paul not to go. Paul told them, “Why are you making this hard for me and breaking my heart? I’m not only ready to go to jail, I’m ready to die for Jesus.”

That’s powerful. Not only is he getting a premonition by the Spirit of what’s coming, he sees no reason to avoid it. This guy is on a mission.

I wonder if I’ll ever become that mission-oriented? Would I do that? When one becomes so focused away from their own safety or concerns that they can genuinely respond like that, it challenges me to want to get to know them…and to imitate them at some level.

And I hope that I can genuinely and honestly say at some point in my life, “Imitate me.”

father and child

I wonder why we think God is not as good of a father as we are?

This weekend Dustin Smith, our Senior High ministry worship leader, led worship in the big room. Charlie Hines (who, along with Jim Zartman, leads worship at VCC) had planned this weekend to introduce Dustin to the wider church. A few weeks ago, my youngest daughter Katie (it’s hard to believe she’s going to be twenty-two shortly) asked to do a worship internship with the Student Union. After her five-month stint with YWAM in Australia, Thailand and Indonesia, she came back with a different slant on her music. Prior to that, her two years in Nashville had kind of cooled down her music aspirations. She went there primarily to connect with other singer/songwriters and, I think, to get out of Cincinnati and individuate. Finding your own voice is part of growing up…and when your dad has an amplified one, it’s probably a bit tougher. But even more, she discovered her own faith…and her own brokenness before God.

It’s not that Katie didn’t enjoy worship. Katie and her sister Rachel have always loved to worship. Some of my fondest memories were hanging over the balcony rail watching the two of them dance during a jam-packed SOS worship jam through their junior and senior high years. Or seeing them lift their hands to God during intimate worship songs. I remember being at a national Vineyard conference in Anaheim in 2001 that had a separate youth conference simultaneously in a huge tent on the parking lot. During one of the evening sessions in the main auditorium, Matt Redman was leading worship and on the first song, all the students were released from outside and came running into the front of the stage singing and dancing. I spontaneously started crying once I spotted Rachel and Katie in the crowd, worshiping with all their hearts. I thought, “Does it get any better than this?” Now as a 23-year old married woman, Rachel sings with the worship band at the Chattanooga Vineyard and helps lead the outreach ministry.

As a former worship leader for many years, I would sometimes look out at a crowd of people and see someone standing there with arms crossed, boredly staring straight ahead, and know they were more than likely dealing with intimacy issues. Not just with God, but with other relationships. Call me crazy, but I think it’s interconnected. I don’t believe it’s a style issue or whether someone likes to sing or not. But to be a believer and in a crowd of people who are actively worshiping God and not give any body language or zero indication of a desire to express love to God strikes me as oddly self-absorbed or at worst, voyeuristic.

Katie never saw herself leading worship, even point-blank telling me years ago, “I’d never want to be a worship leader!” As she learned guitar in high school, she enjoyed writing her own songs about her emotional highs and lows, relationships…and God. But while on her third world mission trip, once the leaders discovered she played guitar, they told her she had to lead worship…they needed her. That’s when Katie’s proverbial paradigm shifted.

Dustin has taken her under his wing and Tuesday and Thursday afternoons are spent at the Student Union along with Saturday nights and Sunday mornings in the senior high celebrations. As an aside, it’s a freebie…internships are unpaid. And one of the things I’m totally weird about is anything that smells like favoritism. Many years ago I remember telling our then-current student ministry pastor, “Never ever show any partiality to my kids. Ever. I’m not kidding.” And I always thought it was weird when pastors turned the leading of their churches over to their kid. Anything that smells nepotistic creeps me out. It’s a heartbeat away from fostering an entitlement-mentality.

Anyway, watching Katie singing and playing her heart out to God was a bit overwhelming to me. I’m not sure how to describe what I felt…or even why I felt the way I did. Saturday night during the ending of the last song, I stood in the wings backstage and watched. When Katie finished, she put her guitar down, walked over and just hugged me. No words needed to be said, but just in case she didn’t know, I told her how proud I was…and then told myself to not lose it. What is it about your kids that so affects you when you see them making attempts to please God? I don’t think there’s anything like it. It’s oddly moving.

And it’s the moment. Whether she ever leads another worship song or decides to go in some completely different direction, it is this moment that I’ll remember twenty years from now. And doing my best to keep it together in the wings.

Which gets me back to the opening question: Do I really believe I’m a better dad than God?

Really?

At the risk of sounding irreverent, I wonder how many times He has stood in the wings with His chest puffed and thrilled to the core because one of His kids has made an attempt, however small, to honor Him in some way? I wonder if His flaming eyes have ever been quenched by tears of pride while watching one of His children do something in the moment that reflected the simplest desire to please Him? Do I truly think that God is devoid of emotion and only responds stoically to expected demands? Have I ever meditated on what it means to be made in His image?

If I did it would force me to answer this question: in times of anxiety and sleepless nights, do I really think I’m a better dad than God?

If your child asks for bread, do you trick him with sawdust? If he asks for fish, do you scare him with a live snake on his plate? As bad as you are, you wouldn’t think of such a thing. You’re at least decent to your own children. So don’t you think the God who conceived you in love will be even better? Matthew 7:9–11 (The Message)

the blind side

Twenty-ten, here we come.

On New Year’s Eve night we did what a lot of old people do: we went to a movie. After a great meal with some friends, we headed to the Rave to see The Blind Side with everyone’s favorite biker girl, Sandra Bullock (and who would have guessed that Faith Hill’s husband was turning into a real actor?).

The hit film is based on the true story of Baltimore Raven Michael Oher’s “rags-to-NFL” journey and has taken in a hefty $209 million and change. It’s a heartwarming story, but it leaves me a little flummoxed. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a feel-good, inspirational movie. Quentin Tarantino it’s not. And it’s dealing with real issues: racism, social classes and poverty. But here’s the deal: the audience was totally white…and will always be. Uh, big deal, Dave. Did you see who went to Narnia?

But here’s what makes me uncomfortable: the subtext is racial reconciliation, yet I wouldn’t invite any of my African-American friends to see it. It’s one more movie about white people rescuing hopeless and helpless black people. I know it’s done earnestly, but if you’re reading this and you’re white, try putting yourself in someone else’s shoes that has years of generational cultural minority baggage and abuse: how would you feel? Would you take your kid to see it? Sometimes the meta-message is bigger than the intended meaning.

And that’s the funny thing about the level of reconciliation that’s needed in the Church between the races. One would think that this movie is about the main character (Sandra Bullock, unlike the book it’s based on) having her perception of African-Americans turned upside-down. She responds to her friend’s statement, “You’re changing that boy’s life,” with “No, he’s changing mine.”

So why would I be uncomfortable inviting my friends to see it? That alone should give me a clue to part of the problem

Reconciliation is the core of Christianity: God reconciling us to Himself. He did this by slipping into the skin and sympathizing with the weaknesses of those who were powerless. That’s the incarnation. Paul sums it up in the hallmark scripture we used during the Christmas series: Your attitude should be the kind that was shown us by Jesus Christ, who, though he was God, did not demand and cling to his rights as God, but laid aside his mighty power and glory, taking the disguise of a slave and becoming like men. And he humbled himself even further, going so far as actually to die a criminal’s death on a cross. (Philippians. 2:5-8 Living Bible)

Jesus had all the power and all the privilege and rights with His Father, they were one in the same. But something remarkable happened because of love. He slipped into the skin of a slave. He knows what it’s like because He did the unthinkable: He became one of us. That’s the responsibility of the one with the power.

Incarnational Christianity is what I believe each one of us is called to do—to slip into the skin of someone else, to feel what they feel and see what they see, and so love them to the fullest. That’s the real thing. That’s why it says in 2 Corinthians: You know how full of love and kindness our Lord Jesus was: though he was so very rich, yet to help you he became so very poor…. (2 Corinthians 8:9a Living Bible). It goes beyond the power of empathy. In the early centuries, it was the Christians that stayed behind in natural disasters, famines and diseases to take care of the ones left behind.

Here’s the theological principle: Reconciliation is the responsibility of the people in power. Understand this: in the Kingdom of God, African-American believers must extend forgiveness to me, their white brother. King Jesus demands it. But there’s something vitally missing in that for me. If I don’t ask for forgiveness and show fruits of repentance by seeking systemic and individual justice, then I’m going to miss the transformational power of love in my life. It is always the responsibility of the people of privilege and power to seek reconciliation, not the other way around. That’s what Jesus did: left the privileges of heaven to reconcile the world to Himself, became a servant.

That’s incarnational Christianity. It’s all about real love. And when I make any attempt to see the world through my black brother’s eyes, then I let go of all claims, defenses and power, and become one with him…reconciled.

Years ago after one of our large scale outreaches, we reconvened in the Atrium with about a hundred of us to tell stories of what happened. I noticed one African-American couple with their little boy of about six or seven years old in a sea of white faces. The second person on the microphone told how excited they were to “talk to a black homeless guy”. She was earnest and sincere. But as I stood there, I wondered what was going on in the head of the husband of the couple who had brought their little son to do an outreach: Would he have to process what was said? Was the meta-message here that what this church does is help “black people” and the people who do that are white? And even more, if you want to grow up and be a leader here, you really need to be white…because that’s how it looked that afternoon. I wondered what it must be like to be a black father who wants to raise his child to be proud of his culture and his heritage, love the heart of the church he’s in, but have to wrestle with what’s between the lines of every conversation and communiqué.

Reconciliation is a little more complex than we who have the power probably think. And as my friend Ray McMillian once said, “I can’t take another foot washing.”

So isn’t reconciliation what Sandra Bullock did in the movie? Yes. But stop and think: the theatre is filled with white people. Maybe if we thought about that more—and the “why” behind it—it would do more for reconciliation than anything.