The Gospel According to Metallica

(The conclusion of a 4-part series)

Many communities have some kind of small, classifieds-only newspaper designed to offer want ads or job postings to people in their city.   For a long time one such paper in the Los Angeles area has been the Recycler.   In early 1981 a teen named Lars Ulrich posted an ad in the Recycler looking for other musicians who were interested in jamming with him.  Guitarist James Hetfield and another musician responded to the ad, and that first jam session eventually resulted in the group we know as Metallica.  

By the mid-eighties Lars and James, along with Kirk Hammett and Cliff Burton had helped create a new genre of rock music known as “thrash metal”.   In the eyes (and ears) of many, thrash metal offered a refreshing alternative to the spandex-makeup-and-big-hair that had begun to define mainstream rock.  Thrash metal artists like Metallica played louder, faster and with a sharper sense of defiance than most artists dared portray.  Their combination of tremendous technical skill and raw fury touched something inside listeners that groups like Kiss or Aerosmith could never reach.  Metallica brought rage into the world of popular music industry. 

Why would a Christian listen to Metallica? 

Many Christians tend to shy away from artists like Metallica.  We assume that anyone venting that much rage couldn’t possibly have much to offer towards a biblical worldview.  A few years ago a pastor friend of mine, John Van Sloten, presented a sermon on the gospel according to Metallica, which began to tip my worldview in this area. 

I’m finding that taking artists like Metallica seriously can help us dig more deeply into some easily overlooked themes in the scriptures.  You might be surprised what we can discover in the Gospel when it’s refracted through Metallica.

Typically we tend to shy away from some of the more gruesome parts of the Bible, hoping to sanitize it into a form more appropriate for religious greeting cards.  A God who would release deadly plagues on the nation of Egypt, arbitrarily killing a nation’s generation of first-born children, seems shockingly out of place in most bible story books.   But somehow that vindictive rage shown by God seems a little less fundamentalist when described by Metallica:  “Die by my hand, I creep across the land, killing first-born man.  Die by my hand…”  (from Creeping Death).

But why would someone want to revel in that kind of ugliness?  Sure these scenes are in the Bible, but what’s the benefit in dwelling on them? 

Artists like Metallica can help us come to terms with the fact that some things in life just aren’t right.  We live in a world that’s not like it’s supposed to be.

We were told this, to be fair.  Way back in the Garden of Eden God warned us that if we rejected him life in our world would begin to unravel, and we’ve been dealing with this twistedness ever since.  In our world if you’re born poor or with the “wrong” skin color you’ll find that you’ve drawn “The Shortest Straw”.   You don’t have to get very far into “And Justice For All” to pick up Metallica’s protest to the blatant unfairness that has soaked into our way of life.   “Justice is raped…”

And God looks down from heaven and says…YES!   

While we stare at him in disbelief He immediately points us to the Minor Prophets where He’s been unsuccessfully to get his people to protest like that for years.  

“For I know how many are your offenses and how great your sins.  You oppress the righteous and take bribes and you deprive the poor of justice in the courts.” (Amos 5:12)

No one calls for justice; no one pleads his case with integrity.  They rely on empty arguments and speak lies.  They conceive trouble and give birth to evil.  (Isaiah 59:3-4)

There is a conspiracy of her princes within her like a roaring lion  Her officials within her are like wolves tearing their prey; they shed blood and kill people to make unjust gain. The people of the land practice extortion and commit robbery; they oppress the poor and needy and mistreat the alien, denying them justice. (Ezekiel 22:25, 27, 29)

“But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like an never-failing stream!” (Amos 5:24)

But the suffering in scripture isn’t limited to the impersonal pain of far-off victims.  The Bible is filled with the stories of real people experiencing real pain—the same kinds of pain we experience.  The members of Metallica are no different than us in that regard.  In interviews the various band members tells stories of a father who never came back from a business trip, of a mother who died young of a preventable cause, of parents whose marriage was scarred by a father’s abuse.  The entire band reeled from the death of Cliff Burton, their first bassist, whose death threw the rest of the band off-balance for more than a decade. 

Life is painful:  not just for the anonymous people behind the headlines, but for people like us.  That’s what led the prophet Jeremiah to burst out:

“Curse the day I was born! The day my mother bore me, a curse on it, I say!    And curse the man who delivered the news to my father:  "You've got a new baby--a boy baby!"  (How happy it made him.)   Let that birth notice be blacked out,  deleted from the records, And the man who brought it haunted to his death with the bad news he brought.   He should have killed me before I was born, with that womb as my tomb, My mother pregnant for the rest of her life with a baby dead in her womb. Why, oh why, did I ever leave that womb?  Life's been nothing but trouble and tears, and what's coming is more of the same.” (Jeremiah 20:14-18, The Message).

In their song Fixxer, the band throws out the same complaint:

But tell me

Can you heal what father’s done?

Or fix this hole in mother’s son?

Can you heal the broken worlds within?

Can you strip away so we may start again?

That’s anger.  Anger for a reason.

But you can’t hold anger forever.  Eventually something’s got to give:  your health, your relationships, your sanity.  Sooner or later it seems that the irresistible force of anger ultimately crumbles every immovable object we might place in its path.  You can hear that in Metallica’s music.  It’s hard to imagine anyone putting more raw passion into any one song.  Eventually something’s got to give.

And finally it did.  Suddenly the scene switches to a hill outside Jerusalem where Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is ripped from his Father by the force of a wrath that we’d never even imagined before.  If you’ve seen the movie “The Passion of the Christ” you can probably form a picture of the scene.  What you’re seeing is the wrath of God coming down like a city bus on an unsuspecting pedestrian.

You can sense that tragedy on Golgotha in The God That Failed :

I see faith in your eyes

Never you hear the discouraging lies

I hear faith in your cries

Broken is the promise, betrayal

The healing hand held back by the deepened nail

Follow the god that failed…

Trust you gave, a child to save

Left you cold and him in grave…

But wait a minute—was that scene really a failure?  We sometimes twist this story into a narrow, judgmental caricature of a God who doesn’t like to be crossed.  But if you look at how God presents this event you find something surprising:  an anger even greater than that of Metallica.  Not simply the anger of irritation or wounded pride.  Not even the anger of injustice or abuse.   This is the anger of a Creator who knows better than any of us just how right  this world was created to be, and just how wrong it has now become since Genesis 3 spoiled everything.

Yes, eventually something has to give. 

But suddenly the scene switches again.  Now we see the risen Jesus Christ appearing in John’s vision in Revelation 21.  Surveying the final arrival of his Kingdom He states it simply:  I am making everything new (Rev. 21:5). God says HERE is where you can point your anger.  Let your anger surface, grieve mourn and wail as it ripens into a longing for the world that we were made for, the one we ache for in our bones.

Sounds like gospel to me. 

Yes, strangely enough, Metallica leads me to Jesus.  Not that the band members themselves have discovered that yet.  It appears that they haven’t, at least so far.  But here’s what I’m learning:  readers of the Bible need to understand voices like Metallica’s to read the Bible more vividly, just as listeners of Metallica need to turn to the Bible to find somewhere they can go with their rage.  Each side needs the other.

If you’ve stuck with me all the way to the end of this blog post, chances are that you can feel some of what Metallica voices so powerfully.  You get it.   Maybe you have lived with some of the same kinds of pain that members of the band have experienced. 

But then let me ask you:  where do you go with your anger, with whatever particular cocktail of hurt and brokenness life has mixed in your heart?  Do you shake your fist at Heaven, giving voice to your frustration?  Or do you try your best to give God the silent treatment?  (not a small feat, given His omniscience).  And how do you picture God responding?  Maybe, like many, you sense God wrinkling His nose in irritation at your bitterness.  Maybe you wonder if He even notices at all.

If God were oblivious to our suffering, then it would seem that He has wasted a lot of valuable space in the Bible to include all those laments and protests that he packed into there.  Why in the world would He include all that ugly stuff if He only wanted us to make nice?  On the contrary, God goads us on in our protests, even giving us some good lines to throw back at Him. 

God is serious about our protests, because the more we feel just how wrong life still is, the more we begin to realize just how right his redemption will be.  If your world only needs a little tweaking to make it right, you’ll only look for a little help from God.  But when we discover a little more of just how twisted God’s creations has become we’re able to make room for a much bigger, deeper, more powerful kind of redemption.   The kind that doesn’t simply make things a little better, but makes things new.

Chances are God has raised the stakes for you, forcing you to look for a redemption that’s real enough to change a world like yours.  He’s goading you on, looking to finally do some business with you as you creep towards redemption.

What are you waiting for?

The Gospel According to U2 ("Still Looking?")

(#3 in a series of 4)

On Sept. 25, 1976,  14-year-old Larry Mullen, Jr. had some new friends over to his house.  He’d posted an ad at school for starting a band and had gotten several takers.  He invited them to a meeting in his kitchen to begin what was to be The Larry Mullen Band.  Mullen explains that that dream lasted for about 10 minutes until a particularly high-wattage student named Paul Hewson (nicknamed Bono Vox after a local hearing aid shop) walked in and blew away the chances of anyone else even trying to lead the band.  Four years later a record deal…the rest, as they say, is album sales. 

In the years since that first meeting, U2 has become not only a primary band in the secular music world, but certainly the largest Christian secular band.

The work of U2 offers a textbook example of how deeply our backgrounds shape our Christian beliefs.  While certainly the written truths in scripture are to be taken at face value, our experiences in life have a dramatic effect on just how we take those beliefs at face value.   For instance, just imagine how different the sermons you hear are from the whatever sermons are furtively shared in a house church in a persecuted 3^rd World setting. 

U2 came together against a very turbulent setting.  Their childhood was spent against the backdrop of “The Troubles” in Ireland, where Protestant-Catholic tensions had created strife that was only inches away from a civil war.  Bono himself was the child of a mixed home, with a Protestant mother and Catholic father.  His mother died when he was 10, and his relationship with his father was very conflicted.   Furthermore, as the band developed three of the four members were part of a Christian community that pressured them to choose between their church and their band.  Leaving that community was a difficult experience for them.

As a result, U2 writes their songs against a backdrop of pain.  Listen, for instance, to Sunday, Bloody Sunday, one of their early anthems protesting the British attack against unarmed demonstrators in the town of Derry in Northern Ireland.   This was for Ireland what the Kent State attacks were for US during the Viet Nam era.

In contrast with other bands, such as The Clash, U2 were not promoting anarchy.  They offered hope, but hope that seeped in through the wreckage of war.

Experiences like these will inevitably result in a different approach to Christianity.  Here in the United States today we tend to avoid ambiguity.  We prefer them clearly laid out, cut-and-dried.  (“Would you like fries with those commandments, sit?”)  

Take, for example, our understanding of Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son, as we know it from Luke 15.  A typical reading of the story renders it pretty simply:  there’s a good guy and a bad guy, and by the end the bad guy becomes another good guy.

It can be easy to miss a lot in a story like that.  For instance, why didn’t the father give his “bad son” a decent hearing with his apology?  He cut him off before he could roll into the confession that he’d been struggling with for weeks.  Or, why did Jesus leave the “good son” out in the cold at the end of the story?   That’s no happily-ever-after.   And perhaps more troubling, why do most of us hope our kids grow up to be older brothers?  Frankly, we could do worse than have our kids grow up to hard-working responsible types who don’t ask for much, not even a goat.

My point is this:  questions like these are troubling, because they can lead to tension and ambiguity.  And so we avoid them, to our detriment.

What we miss in our compulsive clarity is that the Christian faith is not merely a religion, it’s a relationship.  And relationships tend to be messy, conflicted things.  

Religion is generally pretty simple:  either you sign on or you don’t.  If our Christianity is primarily a religion with rules and doctrines and facts to memorize, then it will ultimately be pretty easy to draw the lines to determine who’s in, who’s out. 

A relationship, on the other hand, tend to be a lot more complicated than that.  Compare getting vaccinated to getting married.  Both can be accomplished in less than an hour, yet the one can still remain a mystery decades later. 

The music of U2 is marbled with tensions and ambiguity.   For the First Time portrays the ambivalence of the sons in the Luke 15 parable, and all of us in our exile from Eden.  Until the End of the World offers a poignant portrayal of Judas reaching out for Jesus from the afterlife.  And the tension in Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For  is self-explanatory.

The cumulative effect of a library of U2 music is to deepen our ache for shalom.   Shalom is the Hebrew word describing a situation where everything is right, as it should be.  Take every TV ad you’ve ever seen for luxury cars, for investment firms and for brands of beer and morph them all together.  The end result will be a brittle concept of shalom.

U2 helps us ache for shalom.  A society like ours can tend to numb us, keeping us too busy to ache much for anything.  A band like U2, and a man like Bono, help keep our wounds just raw enough that they can really heal.

Have you ever been famished and had just a tiny nibble to hold you until dinner?   (In a family with three growing sons that seems to happen to someone on a daily basis).  A bite-sized sample of a coming dinner can only leave you more hungry than before.  U2 hungers for shalom, not because they haven’t found anything, but because what they’ve found has only whet their appetites for more. They tasted the feast of the Kingdom, but discovered that dinner might not be served for a while. Jesus put it this way:  Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Question: if God gave you the choice between being numb and being healed, which would you choose?  The fact is most of the things I bring to God in prayer probably fall into the category of pain-relievers.  I want my nuisances to go away, my impatience to be satisfied, and my guilt and shame to subside.

Fortunately God loves me too much to merely give me spiritual ibuprofen to mask my lack of shalom.   I have a growing sense that many of the things I most resist in my life are actually there to play some part in my healing. 

God loves us too much to merely numb us into complacency.  Instead he prompts us to ache for the Shalom that rings through the pages of scripture.  On a good day, that makes sense to me.

So when’s dinner?  I'm starving.

The Gospel According to Michael Jackson ("Is This It?")

(#2 in a series of 4)

It’s a long ways from Gary, IN to Neverland Ranch.  When I was a boy I lived close enough to Gary to smell it.  The community where my family and I were safely tucked away was only about 15 miles from Gary;  I would look at the interstate frontage as we drove to visit family in Michigan for holidays.  Like most of my neighbors, though, I never actually set foot in Gary.  It was a certain kind of town for only certain kinds of people.  Through no merit of my own, I wasn’t one of those people.

I could, however, smell the town when the wind blew from the right direction.  Whenever the breeze shifted to the northeast the industrial stench from the steel mills in Gary would drift over Lansing IL, and for a few hours that distant world clouded my own.  When that happened I was forced to go inside and enjoy the air conditioning.

During those same years a crane operator at one of those steel mills was doing what he could to earn a living for his wife and 9 children.  Feeding all those growing children was tough, and so Joseph Jackson did what he could to moonlight in an R-and-B band.  As his sons grew he discovered that they shared his love of music.  He helped his sons form a group, eventually called the Jackson 5.  They even had little Jermaine and Michael singing back-ups and working their tambourines. 

Eventually the little guys worked their way to the front.  And after that the littlest guy, Michael, became the solo front singer for their group.  And they were amazing.  Polished, singing with an ease and maturity beyond their years.  (Check out their videos on Youtube sometime.  I’ve been to a lot of elementary school music programs;  trust me, they didn’t look anything like that!)   They didn’t look at all like Gary, they looked like Hollywood.

What no one knew at the time was that behind those practiced smiles was a domineering father who supervised the endless rehearsals with his belt ready to enforce his authority.  As various family members have explained in interviews, if you made mistakes you “got your butt tore up pretty good”.

Over time Michael Jackson moved from the front singer to THE singer, launching his solo career as the groups star began to decline.  He emerged on the scene just about the time a new music-video network was getting established:  MTV.   Michael and MTV fit like a marriage made in Neverland.    Before Michael Jackson MTV videos were mostly promotional footage for bands, showing concert footage and studio shenanigans of long-haired musicians.   But Michael reinvented the music video, shaping it into a form of cinema in its own right.  Billie Jean translated the classic detective movie into a musical form, Beat It re-invented West Side Story, and Thriller blew everyone away as the ghouls quietly emerged from their graves, clearly showing “the soul for getting down”. 

In all of these, Michael was amazing.  He could chase away the bad guys, he could reconcile rival street gangs, he could tame the dreaded ghouls from the graveyard…just by dancing!   He could fly loops around the globe faster than you could say “Black or White”.

And it wasn’t just that he was good.  Michael Jackson’s ability transcended whatever limitations mere mortals like you and me had to live with.  Gravity didn’t seem to hold him, the basic laws of physics were no more than mere guidelines as he moonwalked across the stage, sliding and bending in ways that only cartoon characters can hope for.

He made it look easy.   That was the thing, really—watching Michael Jackson made you think you could be cool.  For a few minutes even a heavy-footed, Midwest white boy could imagine gliding and sliding gracefully, every move just perfect.  A few weeks ago I watched “This Is It”, the tribute movie hastily thrown together for Michael Jackson.  It was fascinating to watch him:  a relentless perfectionist, working very hard making it look that easy.

Unfortunately Michael Jackson’s videos all ended after 5 or 10 minutes, only to leave me disappointingly aware that this middle-aged preacher wasn’t going to dance that smoothly any more than he was going to juggle chainsaws.

Of course, I knew that would happen…it happens every time.  But still…something inside me can’t shake the idea that I was meant to be awesome.  

And it’s at this point that God looks down on me from heaven and says…“You think?”

It’s right about then that I’m driven to Gen. 3 where I’m told that things were created to be awesome, that life was intended to be elegant and powerful and nothing was supposed to feel bleak or heavy or clumsy.  And once again I’m driven to realize that even though you can take people out of Eden, you can’t quite take the Eden out of people.

C.S. Lewis once wrote: "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. … Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing."

Michael Jackson’s smoothness made us ache to get past the clumsiness of this life that we consider “real”.  We ache to moonwalk our way from our individual Gary, Indianas, to whatever Neverland might be waiting for us in the pleasant hills of Santa Barbara.    We ache for that…only to find that we can’t get there from here.

And, of course, the media have always made it very clear that not even Michael Jackson was actually as cool as Michael Jackson seemed to be.  The signs of an unsatisfied longing were obvious: the compulsive plastic surgery (reportedly spurred by his father’s verbal abuse accusing him of being ugly, having a big nose, etc.).  The various rumors and sexual charges that, at the very least, proved some serious eccentricity.  In fact, the man just seemed…bizarre, even before he dangled his child off that balcony.

Michael Jackson presented something that he probably didn’t have a whole lot of himself:  hope.  The hope of escaping the heavy drudgery which turns our loving into conflict, our creativity into mere day jobs and the creation itself into a series of environmental crises.

1 Peter 1 talks about the “inexpressible and glorious joy” that can be ours through Christ.  Not because we can finally Beat It, but because Christ himself will someday wipe every tear from our eyes, restoring the glory that we ache to see here in Gary Indiana. 

I can almost—but not quite—get used to living in the bleakness of life after Eden.  But when I see magic set to music something inside me is roused to eager expectation, if only for a few minutes. 

The man may have had flaws, but he helped us ache past our own.

The Gospel According to The Beatles ("All You Need is...What?")

(First in a four-part series.)

If you’ve ever gotten truly filthy, you know how good it can feel to get cleaned up.  Maybe it’s a long day landscaping, or a really good mud football game, or a long-distance run in the rain.  Once you get inside there’s nothing like the feeling of a long, hot shower and the chance to slip into some clean, dry clothes.  You start to feel human again.

I can imagine how that feeling must have swept across Britain after the horrors of World War 2.  After the endless years of air raid sirens, gutted buildings and children sent away to hide in the country it must have felt wonderful to simply settle down again.  To get cleaned up once again.  It’s not surprising, then, that the years following the war on both sides of the Atlantic were marked by an exaggerated sense of tidiness:  the “Leave It To Beaver” era. 

But it was during these years of tidiness that a new wave of children were entering their parents’ world—the Baby Boom.   They arrived untouched by the grime of their parents’ nightmares; they just wanted to have fun.   What had felt snug and secure to their parents began to feel sterile and confining to them.  Soon voices of protest began to emerge.

One of the first of these voices came from a group of young boys from the working-class town of Liverpool, in England.  They were crude, but clever, and they gained a following by gently poking fun of their parents’ generation.  Eventually they were discovered by a record shop owner who offered to serve as their manager, and they were whisked off to Hamburg Germany where they served as a non-stop opening act for various all-night strip clubs there.  After several months of (amphetamine-boosted) marathon performances they returned to England, exhausted.  Eventually this trial by fire forged The Beatles.

Despite their humble start, The Beatles’ creativity rattled English society, like a shot of tequila at tea-time.  They only stayed together 9 years, yet in less than a decade they changed everything musically. 

How?   They expressed an ache that many Baby Boomers had been feeling but couldn’t quite express.   Whether in the cute romance of I Saw Her Standing There, the melancholy grieving of She’s Leaving Home or the wistful longing for community in Yellow Submarine, The Beatles’ music somehow made it easier to believe that there was more to life than dear old dad and mum might ever imagine.   All you need is love, right?

Really? 

The problem, of course, was to figure out just what they were actually longing for.   Albums like the landmark Sgt. Pepper sharpened and deepened that desire, without pointing towards a clear remedy.  The group wandered in and out of a variety of world-view alternatives, including Eastern religions, without finding something credible to hang their spiritual hats on.   And ironically, it was during the years of this search that the Beatles themselves began to unravel in some very unloving ways.  By the time their two final albums were released the band members were facing each other in court, squabbling over everything from money to creative differences.  All you need is love…and a bigger share of the groups’ royalties.

The Beatles had a point—there is more to life than material possessions.  At the same time, The Beatles were ultimately pointless—they had no idea what might present a better alternative.  And they apparently didn’t know that they didn’t know that.

In the Beatitudes Jesus encouraged us to grieve our inability to straighten out our worlds.  “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted,” he said in the Sermon on the Mount, urging us to recognize the futility of creating our own “Octupus’ Gardens, in the shade.”  

Furthermore, the Bible makes it clear that there is only one place to turn to get things straightened out in life.  In Col. 1:15-23 we’re told that Christ is the only one who can reconcile that which is ruined.  To discover the gospel involves grieving our complete inability to fix things in order to cling tightly to the One who can.

We can’t do this on our own.  Left to our own devices we will pendulum-swing from one disaster to another.  The 60’s “free love” led to the STD’s of the 80’s and the broken families of the 90’s and the hopelessness marked by the children of those generations. 

The Beatles helped us ache for that “long and winding road” that might lead us to healing.  What they didn’t realize was that that path was actually straight and narrow.

Discovering the Gospel in Rock Music

I’ve been thinking about popular music a lot lately, as our church has just finished a series of services looking at the topic. I’m going to use my next series of blog posts to reflect on that.  For more on the series, visit www.gatheringchurch.org.

A generation or two ago most Christians were keeping their distance from the disturbing new music known as “Rock ‘n’ Roll”.  There were enough concerns about Elvis (“the Pelvis”) Presley and others of his ilk to convince most decent church folk to keep their distance.   It just didn’t seem normal and it certainly wasn’t godly.

Today things have changed greatly; for better or for worse.  In most Christian families children listen to a variety of popular music stations without hesitation, and their parents may have their own blend of classic, heavy metal, or light rock artists.  Most believers rarely question the fact that all these hours of listening time are devoted to secular music, any more than they might question all the hours they spend watching secular TV.  After all, who would seriously consider watching only Christian TV? 

Clearly our idea of normal has shifted, along with our listening habits.  Is that a good thing?

Right about this point this conversation usually veers directly into questioning the lifestyles of various rock artists, their dubious credibility as role models, etc.  While these are valid questions, Christians have generally found a way to separate the music of their artists from their lifestyles.  Spend a little time reading up on the personal lives of Mozart, for example, (much less Tchaikovsky) to be reminded of God’s ability to inspire amazing art from flawed individuals. 

This blog is not intended to pursue that conversation, as it has already gotten enough column inches during the past several decades.  Instead, I believe there is a far more important conversation that’s been generally neglected: finding hints of the Gospel in rock music.  Throughout the astonishing breath of the popular music industry one can find hints and urges that, if followed, can lead us directly to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

(Now that sounds like a gimmicky seeker-friendly way to try to lure people into your church!   Why not just preach the gospel rather than going all Hollywood about it?  If we’re not careful we could lose our bearings!)

If you read Acts 17 sometime you may be surprised to see the Apostle Paul losing his bearings in the city of Athens.  As any decent Jewish Christ-follower could tell you, Athens was dangerous.  In a first-century world where people collected false gods and goddesses as a hobby, Athens was one of the destinations of choice for someone who really wanted to get serious about it.   Athens was for idolaters what Las Vegas is for problem gamblers.

Paul found himself with time to kill in Athens.  He’d run into trouble in another city and had to leave town quickly.  His supporters brought him to Athens where he would then wait for Silas and Timothy to join him later.   Before long, Paul had found the Jewish synagogue and had begun challenging folks with the news of Jesus Christ.  One thing led to another and before long he’d gotten sucked into the whole “pantheon of gods” scene.  Before you could say “abomination” he found himself talking face to face with some of the big names in idol worship. 

The Greek idolaters seemed to get a kick out of Paul.  They kept goading him with questions and challenges.  Eventually Paul hit pay dirt.   Pointing to the Altar of the Unknown God (their catch-all for whatever deity they may have failed to invent along the way) Paul looked them in the eyes and made his pitch:  I know about this mystery god.  Let me tell you about the god you’re already worshipping.

There was a method in Paul’s madness.  Although in most Jewish eyes he probably seemed to be compromising in his efforts to recruit followers of Jesus Christ, he was actually making surgical strike in a spiritual hot-spot in their world.  Instead of lobbing the gospel at the Athenians from the outside, bellowing condemnation like Jonah in Nineveh, he found something they were already looking for and joined them in their search.   He came alongside of them, respectfully but with full integrity, and helped them with the search they were already on.

There’s a lot that we can learn from Paul’s approach.  Often we approach evangelism as if everyone “out there” were spiritually tone-deaf and needed to be rebuked into the gospel faith.  While rebellion has indeed spread throughout humanity like a spiritual H1N1 virus, the fact is that many people around us are longing for Christ’s redemption, but may not know it yet.

In Romans 8 Paul explained that there’s an ache inside each one of us:  a deep-seated sense that life could be, should be more that what it is—but isn’t.  Rom. 8:22 assures this that this is real.  All creation, we’re told, groans in expectation waiting for God’s redemption to be fully ushered in.   But sometimes we can get so used to this nagging ache that we lose our sense of it.  When we lose our ability to ache we lose our sense of redemption and our awareness of the gospel.  

One of the reasons why it can be important for Christians to follow popular music is that popular artists often have an instinctive way of tapping into this chronic ache.  Let’s face it, when an artist is able to sell millions of albums he or she is clearly offering a lot more than a catchy melody or rhythm line.   Somehow, on a deep level, that artist has been able to connect with something that a lot of potential fans are feeling.   A best-selling artist is able to, in some way, provide listeners with a shock of recognition:  “yes, I feel like that, too!”  

Thoughtful listening to popular music can go a long way in helping us rediscover the human ache for God and the redemption He offers us.   The particular artists may or may not have anything helpful to offer to help with this ache, but they can undo a lot of the numbness that the followers of Jesus can sometimes develop.  

In the next four posts on this blog I’d like to share some reflections on how this ache for God can be seen in the music of The Beatles, Michael Jackson (yes, that Michael Jackson), U2 and Metallica. 

These four artists each speak to the inner ache many of us would just as soon avoid.  By exploring the significance of their voices we can re-discover important aspects of the gospel. 

Downstream

It's surprising how easily you can get swept away in a river.  I remember swimming with our family once in a mountain river near us ("Ruck-a-Chucky" -- isn't that a fun name to say 10 times in a row?)...I remember wading in the icy, waist-deep water and barely being able to stand still.   The water wasn't moving all that fast, but it was still powerful enough to give the power of gravity a good run for its money.

Now ordinarily it's not that hard to stand still.  Mostly it requires, well, just standing there.  But standing still presents a whole new challenge when the lower half of your body is surrounded by slowly moving water.  There's a power called buoyancy which makes your body a lot less heavy.  And once you start to lose your traction even the slowest current can start to take you away.  The waters there were pretty calm and so we weren't in any danger, but I still remember how hard it was to simply stand still.   I'd lift my arms out of the water, stretching as tall as I could out of the buoyant water to get as much weight on my feet as I could.  Reaching up seemed to shift my center of gravity and help me settle back down.  But even then my feet would still slip easily through the sand.

I find the same thing can happen when surrounded by the currents of busyness.  When I go through seasons where the events on my calendar want to sweep me downstream I find myself feeling like a one-armed paperhanger.   Soon I'm struggling simply to get settled into who I'm supposed to be and what I'm supposed to be doing...

(Oops--just got a text about something I was supposed to have done by now.  Bummer.  But back to my train of thought)

...and soon it can feel surprisingly difficult to simply stand still.  To "be still and know that (He) is God" as Psalm 46 says.

What helps, I've found, is to raise my hands.  Reaching up seems to change my spiritual center of gravity  and help me feet to settle back down on terra firma.  I don't know exactly how He does it, but God seems to put my feet back on solid ground (Psalm 40:2).

Ever have that?

"Zoom" Adjustments

It’s not easy to live with suspense. I find I talk to a lot of people who are living with a profound sense of suspense: will I lose my house? Will I lose my job? Will I ever find another one? As a church planter it seems like my own life has been up in the air for a long time.

As Christians, of course, we know we’re supposed to pray about these kinds of struggles, and the Bible seems to indicate that prayer should help us discover a certain kind of peace about things. But saying our prayers doesn’t necessarily seem to change how things look, at least right away. And that can be unnerving.

I’m writing these words on my laptop computer, sitting on my patio. One of the things I like about writing on a computer is the “zoom” feature. Sitting here with my laptop on the top of my…uh, lap I find that the text can seem a little bit too small to read easily. I might just crane my neck and try to squint to track whatever it is I’ve just written. But that looks funny and can get really uncomfortable after a while. What works much better is to go to the “View” menu, click “Zoom” and then simply make all the text appear bigger. With a few gestures on the touchpad (or better yet, keyboard shortcuts!) I suddenly find that everything is so much easier to keep in perspective.

Back to the suspense thing. I wonder if there is a “Zoom” feature in our lives that we need to learn to use. Maybe even develop a few keyboard shortcuts for.

Here’s how it seems to work for me. I find that most of my suspense comes from things that await me in my future. Problems that may come up next week, next month or even next year. Sometimes I can even fret on the basis of a career trajectory or retirement plan. Actually I’m a pretty nimble worrier: I can switch almost instantly from worrying about catching a traffic light green to worrying about what I’ll do when I retire several decades from now. Maybe it’s a mid-life thing.

So here’s what I’ve noticed: the Bible speaks very bluntly about our worry, but much of what it says seems to focus on my daily needs. In His pattern prayer Jesus tells us we should pray “give us this day our annual daily bread”. He also cautions us (in Matthew) to let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day, since each day has enough trouble of its own. And after all that’s how the whole manna meal plan worked in the desert; one day at a time.

Then it occurs to me, maybe my problem is that I need to set my mental “zoom” to the daily setting, not a weekly or monthly or annual view. And that really seems to help. If I adjust the zoom so all I can see is today, God’s faithfulness seems obvious. “By His great love I am not consumed; His mercies are new every morning. Great is His faithfulness” (to borrow words from Lamentations 3). One day’s needs matched up with one day’s grace. Not bad.

But if I zoom back to include more of the future, then suddenly a lot more questions pop up in front of me. Now I'm now faced with 365 days worth of needs pitted against only one days’ grace. I’ve got 365 times more problems than I have grace to deal with them. That looks a lot more dismal. And if I start to think a few decades ahead things can get pretty overwhelming pretty quickly.

So…one of my spiritual disciplines is to learn to re-set my zoom setting to daily more often. And sure enough, I keep finding that His mercies are new every morning, and that each day I’m given my daily bread.

I can live with that.

The Last-Minute God

Do you ever get the impression that God doesn't mind letting you struggle? Perhaps by design ("builds character!"), or maybe just by accident?

Sometimes it can seem like Gods having to scramble a bit to take care of our basic needs? Like he maybe didn't really plan ahead and so like a procrastinating student he's having to cram his Providence in at the last minute, just before your life slides into the brink. That doesn't make much sense to me, but I see it nonetheless. He's the Almighty, with the limitless resources of Heaven at his disposal, and yet he so often seems to delay his care for us until the very last minute. And even then he usually ends up wanting us to do a lot of the heavy lifting. The suspense of following a last-minute God like that can really rattle your nerves.

It drives me crazy, actually. While I'm glad God has cared for me along the way, sometimes I just want to feel SAFE, to feel SETTLED. Instead of worrying about whether he'll come through I'd just like to be able to see that he's already thought through everything I will need.

Seems like he's always been that way. Take, for instance, the day that Jesus ran out of food with all those people. The crowd had gathered, the air was thick with the Holy Spirit and the time must have flown by. Suddenly the day had ended and people were fading fast. Nobody had eaten anything. Jesus turns to his disciples, apparently dumbfounded. Instead of doing something properly Son-of-God like and zapping some rocks into bread, he tries to hand the situation off to his 12 followers. "You feed them", he said (Mark 6). They tried to get him to wrap his mind around the situation. "Eight months' wages wouldn't feed this crowd!"

But Jesus didn't get it. He just wanted to know how much food they did have. He was apparently hoping that the crowd had somehow thought to bring along several thousand picnic baskets. Maybe he was stalling for time. Can you imagine how stupid you feel as a disciple going around asking people if they happen to have a lunch big enough to feed five or ten thousand people?

They came back with one lunch, from a little boy who hadn't eaten it yet. Jesus took the five rolls and two fish and turned his face toward heaven to give God thanks. Have you ever heard someone say thank-you in a way that made it clear that there was more to the story than you'd realized? Jesus gave God that kind of thank-you. And then he started distributing the rolls and the fish, breaking them off. And darned if that lunch didn't keep spreading until baskets of it had been spread throughout the thousands of people who were now watching in stunned silence.

By this point the disciples were the ones who were dumbfounded. They'd just experienced first-hand something that couldn't be explained. They'd handed the boy's lunch to Jesus, they'd heard the thank-you he gave the Father, and then they'd seen those little rolls and the dried fish somehow prove to be sufficient.

Sometimes I wonder what it would have felt like to be that little boy: "That was my lunch that Jesus took. I saw him do it--he broke up those rolls my mom made and started give them to the disciples. And he did the same thing with my dried fish!" The boy who'd probably resigned himself to walking home hungry now discovered what it felt like to be part of God providing more than they could ask or imagine.

What would that have felt like--to have been a first-hand player in a wonderful scene like that? I'm guessing that that little guy was never hungry in quite the same way again. Even if his belly emptied, I'd like to think that his hunger only served to remind him of the fact that food can be stretched to provide what's really needed. In fact he'd probably discovered something that can only be learned when you're hungry. And I'll bet he felt SAFE, even SETTLED; filled with the sense that God really has thought through everything.

All the things I'd like to feel like.

God apparently let him hunger in a way that would let him discover what it felt like to be truly filled.

I'd like to be like that boy when I grow up. In the meantime, here's my lunch, Lord.

Getting "Fed" by Your Preacher

People often talk about the need to feel "fed" by their preachers. Secretly a lot us preacher-types cringe at those conversations, probably for a lot of different reasons.

Sometimes listeners can be "picky eaters" and so no matter what you put on their plates they're going to have low blood sugar by the time they turn on the Sunday afternoon sports on TV. Sometimes we cringe because we wish we had more to offer them--pastors with overflowing to-do lists have to deal with the reality that there simply isn't as much time as there should be to create a truly substantial meal. But sometimes we cringe because those kind of conversations can end up being vague, unhelpful volleys of cliches. What do people really NEED from a sermon?

Obviously, people need the Bible. Without that a preacher is merely slinging anecdotes and illustrations. But just because a preacher refers to a lot of Bible verses or really takes apart all the words in one passage doesn't mean people will walk out feeling fed. The reality is that there are different "food groups" listeners need from scripture, and heaping a congregation's plate full of an unneeded food group can still leave them strangely unsatisfied, even if bloated.

Here are three major food groups people need from sermons:

* Biblical information. What does the Bible say? People need to become familiar with what's in their Bibles. They need to learn important people and events recorded there, they need foundational doctrines presented in it, and most of all they need the simple, over-arching story of a perfect world, ruined by sin that's being reclaimed by Christ in anticipation of the day when all things are made new. If people don't know their Bibles nothing else will make sense.

* Biblical application. What does this mean I should do? Knowing scripture without knowing how to apply it can sometimes result in disappointingly little life-change. All the bible knowledge in the world will make very little difference if listeners never discover what it will look like for those teachings to be applied to their lives. What do they need to do differently because of what the Bible says to them?

* Biblical self-knowledge. Why do I often resist this? Biblical information and practical application alone won't necessarily bring change to someone's life if their heart isn't open to that transformation. The fact is that as fallen people our hearts instinctively resist receiving God's grace and sharing it with others. Our hearts can unexpectedly spasm, leaving them hardened against God's transformation. Preachers need to help listeners discover some of the more common ways in which the Enemy tricks us into turning our backs on the new life God offers.

These are three of the more common food groups needed in a sermon diet. One of the challenges facing preachers is that no two congregations have the same dietary needs, and and in fact no two listeners in any one church family need exactly the same thing. A preacher offering solid Biblical information may leave people starving for application, or sermons that are rich with application may ring flat if people aren't helped to open their hearts to receive what scripture offers.

Pray for your preacher as he or she plans your congregation's menu.

And then clean your plate when the meal is served.

A Call for You?

Why do you do whatever it is you "do" in life? If you're a student, an executive, a lawnmower repairman or whatever it is...why did you decide to head in that direction? Chances are there may be some pretty good common sense reasons for your choice: a good opportunity, the need to pay bills, maybe the expectations of other around you.

When you become a pastor they don't talk like that. Suddenly the whole "what-to-do-when-you-grow-up" takes on a much more pious tone. You don't merely decide to become a pastor, you discern a call. Sounds a lot more mysterious--kind of like Jake and Elwood Blues deciding to get their band back together in Blues Brothers. That kind of talk is taken as normal for preacher-types, and I've had a lot of conversations where I've told people of the process through which God called me to serve him in full-time ministry.

But to a lot of people that kind of talk would sound funny applied to other jobs or professions. "When did you discern your call to drive that delivery truck?" "When did you discover God was calling you to be a personal-injury attorney? Somehow it seems strange to think of people in other jobs actually being called to those professions.

OK, let me get more specific with you: when did you first realize that God was calling you to (insert your job or school status here)? Chances are most non-minister types would look at me kind of funny in the face of a question like that. People may choose their jobs for an of a number of reasons, but a clear call from God usually isn't very high on the list.

That seems strange to me. The Bible speaks so clearly about God's plans for our lives: Eph. 2:10 reminds us that we are "God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which He prepared in advance for us to do". Psalm 139 assures us that "all the days ordained for (us) were written in His book before one of them came to be." If God has plans for every single day of our lives, and if there are some very specific reasons why you and I are exactly where we are--then wouldn't it make sense for us to ask God what He wants us to do? And if we start to get tired of whatever that was, wouldn't it make sense to ask Him again before jumping into whatever comes next.

In our denomination we take a minister's call very seriously. In fact there are pretty tight restrictions placed on people like me who have been called to ministry. I think that's good; if God called me to something I should think twice before jumping into something else just for a change. What if we did that with substitute teachers or computer techs or with oil change specialists?

When Jesus Got Distracted

I grew up with the idea that Jesus was all about the cross. Somehow I got the impression that the events of Holy Week the only real priorities for him. It never really occurred to me to wonder what He'd been up to for the three years of his public ministry before that week, or even the thirty years of his life, for that matter. Seems like a long ramp-up process, especially for the Son of God.

Actually, if you read the Gospel accounts you begin to get the sense that Jesus got off-task quite a bit. He almost comes off as having a little bit of redemptive A.D.D: just when he's working up a good head of steam about our sins...HEY LOOK GUYS, A LEPER! And off He'd go, getting all caught up healing some disabled person or talking about giving a cup of cold water to some poor kid. Fortunately the Apostle Paul was able to cut through these distractions and lay things out decently and in good order in books like Romans and Galatians.

Unless...maybe Jesus wasn't distracted. Maybe He took three years to start rocking things with a quake whose epicenter was located by that empty tomb outside Jerusalem. Maybe He was actually demonstrating exactly what He was doing during His time on earth with us. Making all things new, wiping away every tear from our eyes, letting the dumb start scat-singing with pleasure and the lame start breaking out in some celebrative dance steps. Maybe we needed to see how "distracted" He could get so we didn't freeze-dry His gospel down to four spiritual laws through which we could calculate our salvation. In fact, the Apostle Paul himself did all his theologizing against a backdrop of all creation "groaning as in the pangs of childbirth" waiting for Christ's redemption to be completed.

You know, maybe we don't get distracted enough.

Why I Hate Manna

It’s hard to live one day at a time.

Lately I’ve been feeling that and seeing it in the lives of people I care about. The steady drain of financial suspense. The cold prospect of disease creeping into the life of a friend. The heart-wrenching pain of sudden bad news in lives of friends. And while today seems to have worked out—barely—who knows what will happen tomorrow? That’s what living on manna must have been like (Exodus 16).

It’s not that manna’s so bad, actually. It’s actually amazing if you really think about it. Fed directly by God--how cool is that? Every day there’s a brand new helping of what you need, carefully dished out in the perfect portions designed for you.

It’s not the manna really. Manna is fine, even if it lacks the variety. And it’s not even the “coming from heaven” part of it. Even after all these years of Bedouin backpacking the daily reminder of His presence is still reassuring.

The problem with manna is that it’s all you get. It’s not like you can scare up some nice roasted quail, and you can hardly remember the exotic fruits and vegetables from Egypt. And so when you’re forced to have the same thing day after day after day…well, you begin to discover that you really hunger for more than bread alone.

Just think how nice it would be to have a choice, after all. Choosing another round of manna would be so much more empowering than simply being given it. “What do you feel like for dinner tonight, dear?—Oh…how about some manna this evening?” It’s nice to have some variety on the menu.

But the real problem with manna is that there’s no back-up supplier. It only comes from Him. And while He’s never failed to deliver, He’s also made a point of never giving one extra flake to store away. No matter how careful you might be, it’s absolutely utterly impossible to get any kind of margin for tomorrow. That's got to raise at least a few questions for you. There’s simply no way to get any kind of real security. And so you live from one morning’s manna-gathering to the next, with the nagging realization that if this crazy bread from heaven even thinned out you’d face certain disaster. It’s humbling to feel so dependent. Sometimes manna tastes like eating crow.

And so you hunger, even when your stomach’s stuffed. You hunger in advance for tomorrow because you never know how tomorrow will turn out. You hunger for some of the fruit from the Tree in Eden, back when God first started all these crazy limits on our diet. Sometimes it almost seems like too much.

And yet, by His great mercy, we are not consumed. His mercies are new every morning. Great is His faithfulness. (Lam. 3:23)

Sometimes, sitting back after a big meal of--you guessed it—manna, you begin to get a strange sense that maybe it’s supposed to be like this. Your days uncluttered by the hubris that comes from margin, your plans completely aligned with the giver of manna, the Giver of All Good Things. You realize you have exactly what He wants you to have, no more and no less. Relying not simply on the daily spread of that crazy desert bread, but relying even more on the character of the One who gives that manna. He is good, you’ve discovered.

No one would ever choose to live on manna. Maybe that’s why God doesn’t give us the choice. He gives what we hunger for even while depriving us of what we want.

How to be miserable.

I've been thinking about happiness this week, preparing for this Sunday's "How to be Miserable". (Now there's a sermon title that'll really pack 'em in!)

Our country has always been based on "the pursuit of happiness". That little phrase would have been remarkable in the 18th century. Not many monarchs at the time were staying awake wondering whether their people were happy. As long as they had bread--or cake, in the case of the French--why bother?

There are some interesting assumptions in the phrase "the pursuit of happiness". First of all, what makes us think that happiness should actually be a right that we should expect to pursue? Should happiness be considered essential, or is it merely a kind of icing on our cake? But even more striking is the assumption that happiness is something that we can identify, set our aim toward, and pursue. It assumes that you and I have a pretty good idea what will make us happy, and if only given the chance to pursue them we can be happy.

But what if happiness wasn't something we could engineer ourselves? What if being happy was actually more like sneezing? If you've ever been stuck mid-sentence, your face contorted by a sneeze that wasn't quite ready to launch, you know how hard it can be to force something like that. Sometimes we're the most miserable when we're busy trying to be happy.

People often turn to the Bible to find happiness. The problem is that the Bible seems to take its time getting around to issues of happiness. Along the way there's an awful lot of taking up one's cross, dying to self and even having to rise again with the crucified savior. The Bible's picture of fulfillment often seems to be anti-happiness: turning the other cheek, giving up one's cloak, forgiving the very people who made us unhappy in the first place.

Here's the secret. While the Bible seems pretty nonchalant about happiness, it is much more serious about something else: joy. Joy is what can come when you've been so thoroughly filled by Something so completely satisfying that one's level of happiness becomes less and less important. Joy is what Paul bubbled with when he wrote to the Philippians about how it didn't really matter whether he lived or died, he just wanted to serve Christ. (He almost sounded a little Buddhist at that point, except you can tell that he cared more deeply than any respectable Buddhist would allow.)

Our nation has unprecedented freedom to pursue our own personal happiness. I don't think it's helped very much. From what I can tell, people who "have it all" don't seem to be enjoying life any more than people who have much less. They just experience their frustration while living in bigger houses.

Most of my personal fantasies still tend to aim towards "having it all", but God's helping me get over that. He's steadily weaning me from happiness and whetting my appetite for joy. On the days when I cooperate with him, I find the strangest thing happen: pleasure.

I enjoy that.

I'm Good!

“I’m good.”

We say that sometimes, usually when someone asks if we need help. Sounds a little presumptuous, but it seems to work with current slang expressions. I may stumble noticeably, my friends turn and ask if I need any help, to which I respond: “No, I’m good.”

It’s ironic, of course, because usually if someone has reason to ask us this it means we’re actually not doing very well. We rarely announce our “goodness” when we successfully step over a curb in a parking lot and enter a store without incident. It’s not until we trip over that curb that it even occurs to us to announce our self-sufficiency to our fellow shoppers. It’s only when we’re obviously having trouble that we feel the need to proclaim our goodness.

Actually, the expression “I’m good” probably means something quite the opposite. It probably means something like “Even though I’m having trouble, I’d still rather handle things on my own.” Or more succinctly: “(I’d like to think that) I’m good!”

I think there are a lot of people in the bible who would understand this. I think of Nicodemus in John 3, discreetly searching out Christ under the cover of night. Something’s not quite right, so he seeks Jesus’ word on becoming acceptable in God’s eyes. Jesus flatly informs him that he must be born again. Nicodemus briefly ponders the cost of surrendering a lifetime of religious celebrity; the price is too much to ask. “I’m good,” he tells the Messiah, as he scurries back into his night.

Or the more candid approach of the Rich Young Ruler in Luke 18. “What must I do to be good”, he asks Jesus. Give away all your riches, Christ tells him. He, too, slinks away: “That’s OK--I’m good.”

It’d be nice to think that God will simply accept us as we are: not perfect, but certainly not bad. But we have to do a few theological acrobatics to get this to happen. Claiming goodness involves somehow lowering the bar of God’s standards until we can easily clear it. We re-phrase “be perfect as your Father in Heaven in perfect” until it sounds like “be a little better than other people you know.”

Contrast this with the Philippian jailor, as found in Acts 16. He’s in trouble. An earthquake has broken open his stronghold and now the prisoners entrusted to him are now free to escape. This is not good. In his mind he already hears his death sentence pronounced: his life for theirs. In his panic he turns to Paul and Silas: “what must I do to be saved?”

Now, I must tell you: I find this question a bit curious. Where I grew up the word “saved” was usually reserved for conversations involving a specific understanding of Jesus’ role in covering the guilt of our sins. In the middle of what’s probably the worst crisis of his life this jailor is calling a quick time-out to discuss Paul and Silas’ theory of the atonement? I don’t think so?

It’s probably fair to say that whatever the jailer meant by the word “saved” must have extended much further than clarifying his doctrine of justification by faith. This was a big question he was voicing.

However, I think I know what he’s wasn’t saying at that moment: “I’m good”.

There’s something that happens when someone suddenly discovers their complete inability to make their life “good”. That may come in a jailer’s crisis, an adolescent discovery or maybe in mid-life changes, but however it happens it involves a surrender of everything to the One who can actually make things happen well.

Announcing “I’m good” is probably forgivable when I stumble a little. After all, it’s just a figure of speech. But a day is coming when those words will take on a lot more meaning. On that Day every single stumble I’ve ever made—including the big ones—will be inventoried for public display if needed. I wonder if I’ll cringe as I realize how long that list really is. But as everyone’s attention turns to that list, someone will hold up nail-scarred hands reassuringly.

“It’s OK”, he’ll declare. “He’s good.”

Who would notice?

Question: If our church were to suddenly disappear overnight, who besides our members would notice? Would we be missed enough to suggest that Christ was really doing something in our community through us?

Answer: We'll talk more at The Gathering this Sunday morning.

Voluntary Stress

Been thinking about monkeys this week. They seem to keep coming up in conversations.

A long time ago someone once explained to me how a monkey trap works. The trap consists of a hollow gourd, attached by a stout rope to a tree or some other immoveable object. The gourd contains something that will draw the interest of the monkey (some food, a trinket or some other kind of monkey bling), which can be seen through a small hole just large enough for a monkey to insert its hand through. The aforementioned monkey comes along, notices the bait and reaches for it, squeezing its hand to get it through the hole. Once it's reached inside it quickly clutches whatever it was that had drawn its interest. However it they try to remove its hand it discovers that its clenched hand can no longer fit out the hole. As long as the monkey clings to the bait, it's stuck, although it could easily escape were it to let go of the bait. The monkey is now facing the difficult dilemma of choosing between freedom or the chance that it can somehow get that bait out of the gourd.

I find that fascinating. I guess I'm intrigued by the simple idea of a monkey voluntarily holding its hand in the trap that will lead to its capture. Perhaps the fact that I'm not a monkey leaves me with a little bit of a cavalier attitude the plight of the monkeys.

But it does make me wonder how often I allow myself to get stuck by clinging to something that's simply not worth it. Not to get all Buddhist about this, but there's something here that's worth more thought. That's probably how most of my temptations work. That's the dynamic behind most church fights, in my experience. I suspect that a large percentage of my stress comes from various gourds into which we've inserted our clenched fists. My life is blissfully free from major crises right now, and I find it disconcerting to think about how much of my stress might be considered voluntary.

How about you? How much of your stress is self-inflicted?

Why I Don't Wear Tights

I’ve been thinking about superheroes lately. This Sunday our church is doing a special family service using that theme and it's gotten me thinking: it’d be pretty cool to be a superhero.

When I was a kid I used to imagine being able to fly, or having a special bat-cave for all my space-age electronic crime-fighting stuff. Actually, I probably would have settled for figuring out how to get my mom’s picnic blanket to flutter when I draped it over my shoulders. Superman’s cape always fluttered straight out behind him but even when I ran my fastest mine always seemed to just hang there. I guess I must not have run very fast, at least not while trying to watch my cape over my shoulder at the same time.

While I have very little interest in parading around in tights (no…strike that, pretty much NO interest in that sort of thing) I still probably harbor some latent desires to have superpowers. To be able to zoom overhead when everyone else has to wait in traffic, or to be able to hear or see through walls to know everything that’s going on. To be a super-pastor, or a super-dad, or even a super lawn guy on the weekends. That’d be pretty cool.

But, alas, I’m not. I don’t have any ability that couldn’t also be found in some other guy. Instead of Mr. Incredible I’m probably more like Mr. Forgettable. On a good day I qualify as normal.

I wonder if that’s how Simon Peter looked at himself. A blue-collar Budweiser kind of guy, working The Deadliest Catch with his brother and their buddies. Voted by his classmates Most Likely to Get in a Fight. And yet Jesus picked him out, invited him to sign on for a whole new life. Peter apparently didn’t buy the whole idea at first: “Get away from me—I’m a sinful man.” But eventually Peter began to realize that Jesus’ call was not based on what Peter could do, but on what Jesus could do through Peter.

The result was amazing. In less time than it takes Brett Favre to retire a few times, Peter became a disciple, cast out demons, walked on the waves he used to fish, faced the wrath of the Jewish authorities, sold out his savior to save his neck and then discovered what grace really felt like. On Pentecost morning a stone-sober Peter blazed with such passion they thought he was drunk. At least until 3000 of them came forward for his altar call.

Peter is one of my heroes. I think he’s super, actually.

If that’s what Jesus saw in that fisherman, I wonder what he sees in me?

And what do you think He sees in YOU?

Fogged In

Faith is the dirty little secret behind Christianity. It suppose it’s necessary, but given the choice I often think I’d prefer an alternative.

Faith can be like the little “donut” spare tire found in the trunk of many smaller cars. When all else fails it’s nice to be able to dig it out so you can keep on moving down the road. But as soon as possible you want to replace it with something that feels a little more substantial.

I’m discovering that much of my ambivalence towards faith comes from a basic misunderstanding we often have about what faith really is. We often tend to look at faith as something we need to do, as if we were the ones doing whatever needed to be done for the object of our faith to be true. When faced with a crisis, we cringe and brace ourselves as we muster up as much God-optimism as we can in order to make sure that His promises still hold true.

Taken this way, faith becomes a verb, an action; like peddling an exercise bike on a generator to keep the lights on. Actually, it’s a form of fear: we worry that if we were to grow tired of faith-peddling the lights of Heaven would dim. If we can only keep “faith-ing” hard enough God will provide what we need from him—working all things for our good or forgiving our sins or guiding us when we face decisions.

It’s strange that we picture faith in that way, because that’s not at all how the Bible describes it. Hebrews 11 doesn’t describe faith as an effort, but rather as a kind of visibility: “Now faith is being…certain of what we do not see.” Faith is an ability to see something that was already there whether we’d spotted it or not.

I live in Northern California, and I enjoy the San Francisco Bay. One of the things I love most about the Bay is the fog that often creeps in. When the fog arrives things change quickly. The city of San Francisco suddenly vanishes, or Angel Island or Alcatraz may turn up missing. Drivers across the Golden Gate Bridge may begin their crossing with no visible proof that the other half of the bridge even exists. Once while sailing I discovered that the city and two prominent islands disappeared around me in ten minutes’ time. That was weird.

People who live in this area have learned to adapt to the fog. There’s no widespread panic because of a missing bridge or misplaced mountain. Folks have discovered that all those landmarks are still there; they’re just temporarily out of sight. They have learned that if they can just be patient for a few hours they will get their bridge back and their mountains and islands will once again return. That’s just how fog works. (Earthquakes, on the other hand, have been known to make lasting changes.)

The principle is this: fog doesn’t change our landmarks; it changes our visibility of those landmarks.

I find that the same principle applies to faith. There are days when God’s hand can be clearly seen in my life. I can bask in His love and my heart is felled with a sense of confidence in His care for me. But there are other days that aren’t like that at all. A fog of doubt or a haze of shame creep in and suddenly all of those spiritual realities seem to have vanished. No matter how hard I may try to muster up the sunny emotions I might have enjoyed before nothing seems to help. All my peace and joy seems to have vanished, like the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge.

And that’s where a Hebrews 11 kind of faith comes in. Faith is my awareness of the fact that all those things are still there, even when i can’t see them at the moment. It takes a kind of faith to drive across a bridge when you can’t see the other side. It takes the same kind of faith to continue loving a difficult family member, or to continue serving in a ministry role or following a call to a particular ministry, or to continue to fight a chronic temptation.

Taken in a broader sense, our faith doesn’t necessarily change some of our fundamental realities, it only exposes them. My faith doesn’t cause God to be faithful; it simply discovers that He was faithful all along.

Seen this way, faith becomes a kind of imagination; seeing things in the fog. Not fantasy, mentally rearranging the landmarks as I might wish, but a realistic imagining of what I know to be true. When the visibility drops on the Bay I can still visualize where the bridges are and where the islands are located. With the help of my GPS I can still tell how things are laid out, even if I can’t really see.

So also when my awareness of God is obscured. I can picture God loving me or providing for me or forgiving me even when that’s not how it looks because I’ve discovered that those things are really true. With the help of my Bible I can still tell how things really are, even if I can’t currently see.

I’m learning that I don’t have to make God faithful, I simply need to enjoy the fact that He already is. That takes the pressure off, letting Him do most of the work.

And I can handle that.