Evangelism--Offending People for Jesus

Most of us cringe at the prospect of evangelism.  While it’s necessary, of course, it still feels like we’re getting pressured to offend people for Jesus.  Here in Northern CA the idea of encouraging someone else to convert to your religious views feels like the verbal equivalent of the Crusades. 

Yet…we’re supposed to just do it, aren’t we?   Isn’t that what God tells us?

I’m increasingly convinced that much of our evangelistic anxiety comes from a pretty basic misunderstanding that we make when it comes to sharing our faith.   We tend to think of evangelism as something prescriptive.  A person is being prescriptive when he or she is urging someone else to do something.  That’s why a doctor will prescribe a particular treatment for an ailment a patient may have, perhaps even writing a prescription.    We typically think of evangelism in this way:  evangelism is the process through which we exhort our friends and neighbors to adopt our spiritual views.   Most people, at least where I live, don’t seem to appreciate this prescriptive approach to spiritual matters.  They don’t request Amway sales calls, either.

But another alternative can be found in what we could call descriptive evangelism.  A person is being descriptive when he or she is simply describing an experience they’d had.  When friends tell you how much they enjoyed a new movie that’s come out or how they loved the new Thai restaurant they tried last night, they are being descriptive about what they’d experienced.  You can’t argue with that.

So what if we thought about evangelism in those terms? Prescriptive evangelism would then describe an effort to convince someone else to change their spiritual beliefs at your urging.  (“Turn or burn!”)  All too often, you’d be simply asking for a fight.  On the other hand a descriptive approach to evangelism could avoid that tension by simply presenting what you or I have already experienced.  Telling someone about the peace or joy you’ve discovered, or how prayer has brought noticeable changes in your life would both be examples of descriptive evangelism. 

The beauty of descriptive evangelism is that it’s virtually argument-proof, when done correctly.  It’s impossible to argue with someone’s personal experience—they’re simply telling you what happened to them.  It’d be silly to try to convince your friends that they actually hated that movie or that they really thought the new restaurant’s food was terrible. You wouldn’t know; you weren’t even there!

Evangelism, viewed this way, would focus primarily on simply not hiding the good things that God had been doing in our lives?  And at this point a lot of scriptures would begin making more sense.  Just imagine if we asked God to create opportunities to “let our gentleness be evident to all” as Paul wrote the Philippians?   Or what if we prepared ourselves to “give an answer” to explain the hope we have as Peter wrote in his first epistle?    What if we simply stopped hiding the lamp of Christ’s love, taking it out from under whatever bowl we’d hidden it as Jesus himself challenged us?

That’d be a lot easier.  People wouldn’t need to brace themselves against us.  In fact, they’d probably start to get curious:  “what do you mean, you’re at peace in the middle of all this stress? “  “You just prayed about this, and now you’re getting these lucky breaks?”   

Question for you: if you were transparent about what you’ve experienced with God, what would other people see?

Getting What You Want

Sometimes it’s not good to get what you ask for.

As a boy, a friend of mine loved to visit his big sister at the deli where she worked.  Sometimes she’d fix him a treat; one day it was a bagel with cream cheese.  He loved it.  On his next visit, hoping for the same treat, he asked his sister for “a bagel with sour cream”.  She looked at him quizzically and began to suggest that perhaps he meant cream cheese, but he was quite insistent on his order.  Eventually she toasted a bagel, topped it with sour cream and handed it to him.  His face scrunched into a grimace as he suddenly realized his mistake.  Humbled, he asked for a bagel with cream cheese.  

Sometimes getting what we ask for isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  We insist that we want sour cream on our life’s bagels, only to finally get our request and discover that that wasn’t really what we wanted.  Sometimes getting what we’re asking for can leave a sour taste in our mouths.

The Bible is full of examples of people with gagging on their sour cream.  Just ask Jacob, scurrying into the night having snagged the birthright he’d never use. Or Samson, blind (literally) in his pursuit of Philistine pleasures. Or just ask David, finally having enjoyed the friend’s wife he’d been longing for.  Perhaps you can tell similar stories from your life:  times when you tried to force a pleasure or an achievement or make a purchase even though others questioned whether your choice was wise. 

God created us to be hungry--but for things that only He can satisfy.  What have you been hungry for lately?

The Faith of Atheists

I could never be an atheist. It would take way too much faith.

To be fair, I’ve really got to respect people who are so deeply committed to their faith position, even if I don’t happen to buy their viewpoint myself. We can all learn from each other, I figure. And besides, it’s inspiring to see someone stake their entire worldview, and even their whole lifestyle, around something that can’t be proven. You’ve got to admit there’s something pretty bold about shaking your fist in the face of millennia of human common sense. That just inspires me. It’s pretty gutsy, actually.

Most atheists I know would never brag about it, of course—which I also respect—but it’s not hard to see how their worldview is based solidly on the kind of faith that can never be proven. After all, how can you prove nothing? How on earth could anybody ever check to make sure that God really wasn’t there? Ultimately it comes down to their faith that they won’t find themselves in line at some Pearly Gates or shocked to discover that they’ve been reincarnated as some lower life form. Like anyone else, they’ve made their faith commitments.

Throughout recorded history civilization after civilization has succumbed to the obvious common-sense assumption that someone or something Greater Than Us was responsible for life in our universe. Granted, folks had a hard time agreeing on just who or what that “Greater Than Us” actually was. While some subscribed to Jehovah, others signed on for Baal or Allah, or the Buddha or the Great Pumpkin or whatever other local deity they chose. But no matter what brand name people happened to choose, virtually everyone agreed that there was someone or something out there--from tribes in Africa to the great civilizations in the Middle East or Asia, to the rise of Judaism and Christianity, countered by the celtic religions in Europe and all the various brands of eastern religion now featured. (And don’t even get me started on the whole pantheon of gods that the Greeks and Romans developed. Personally, I can never keep them all straight.) But the fact is that until the Enlightenment suddenly sprang up a few generations back, everyone just took it as obvious that someone or something was behind the wonders of our world.

And that makes sense to me. All I have to do is spend an evening up in the Sierras gaping at the infinite fog of starlight that has exploded in our little corner of the galaxy and I quickly slide into the assumption that this could not have happened by accident. Call it peer pressure if you want—I’ll admit there probably is something reassuring about knowing that for untold centuries of human civilization everyone has come to the same conclusion that I have. But regardless, I just think it would be hard to be an atheist outdoors.

But that’s why I can appreciate the courage of the staunch minority who in the past few generations have decided to march to a different non-drummer. Recently, as seen from the span of human history, a few bold thinkers have theorized that all those galaxies and constellations have somehow appeared by accident. They point proudly to the theory of evolution as a kingpin in their worldview. I’m no scientist, but my understanding of that theory is that we’re all somehow mutants, having morphed from the first glops of seaweed that washed up on a beach somewhere. Maybe other folks can understand some of these fine points, but I have a hard time grasping this. I’ve known a few mutants in my day (hey, I’ve watched cartoons just like anybody else) and I have a hard time seeing how the continually mutating offspring of the first mutants could result in something like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. You ask me, bass guitar licks like Flea’s don’t just happen.

Maybe my problem is with science. Maybe I should put more willing to put my faith in science as a way to figure these things out. But I figure: the best science of the day got us the Flat Earth theory. Then a little bit later the new-and-improved best science of the day got us the Round Earth theory. (Note: at the time of this writing the earth was still round). I just keep looking for someone to take responsibility for that Big Bang. That much noise, somebody had to hear something!

And maybe I’m just a little too common-sense about it all. I suppose any academic discipline can have a bad century now and then. Who knows? Maybe all the pieces did line up just right to enable sea scum to somehow produce Michael Jordan’s dunk shot or whatever magic there is that makes my laptop here come to life when I turn it on.

But it just seems like a long shot to me. Buying into that would take a lot more faith that I seem to have. Rumor has it some guy in Ohio dumped 10,000 dominoes off the roof of a school gymnasium and they randomly formed a perfect version of the Mona Lisa, including getting the smile just right. Call me a skeptic, but I have a hard time with that one, too.

I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m judging my atheist friends. Most of them are really good people who are genuinely sincere about what they believe. And maybe their faith in science can do for modern medicine what Mother Teresa’s faith did for the poor of Calcutta. What’s not to like about that?

But having said that I also don’t like it when atheists get all fundamentalist on me. Maybe I’m not as smart as they are with their fancy theories about everything, but I can’t help but feel judged when they smile kindly at the fact that I still don’t “get it”. Call me crazy, but I still say the emperor has no clothes.

What I would like to see would be an open-minded kind of dialogue about all of our different kinds of faith. I'm not talking about some kind of evangelistic shoot-out where anybody’s trying to convince me that I should have faith in whatever scientific theories they’re betting the farm on. I’d just thing it’d be interesting to learn from the faith stories of some atheists who’ve been at it a while. How does it feel put your faith in a minority viewpoint? How do you shore up your faith when you have those inevitable moments when you can’t help but wonder whether you may have been put here for a reason? How do you begin to explain your trust in something you could never prove?

I don’t know. Maybe I’m missing something simple here. But whenever I look for something that would offer a reason to have faith in atheism, all I find is…

…nothing.

In Trouble

Been reading the New Testament book of I Peter lately…part of a sermon series Stan and I are working through here at The Gathering.  Great book, especially for those times when don’t seem to be going like you’d hoped.  The epistle is all about trouble, which is why it can make for good reading during a recession. 

A word about trouble:  there’s a big difference between having troubles and being in trouble.    Having troubles is pretty normal:  you get a bad grade in school, you come down with the flu, you get a flat tire driving home from work.  Most troubles, while annoying, can be fixed pretty easily.  You pull out your spare tire, figure out how the crazy jack works, and make the switch.  Before too long you’re on your way, remembering to wash your hands when you get to your destination.  

Most troubles aren’t really so hard to deal with.

But when you begin to get too many of those troubles it starts to affect your worldview.  You begin to get the sense that everything in your life is starting to fall apart.  You  suspect that even if you were to fix one or two of the problems in front of you there would be two or three other problems that would creep up on you from another side.   You find a sense of futility begins to hang over your efforts—even if you fixed one of your problems you’d still face so many others that it’d hardly make a difference. 

An eerie realization begins to well up inside you:  it’s not that you simply have troubles, you realize that you are now in trouble.   Your struggles have claimed your worldview. 

That’s when you start losing hope.  Hope is the force field that fends off a sense of futility.  When you lose hope, despair slowly seeps into your heart. 

Let’s face it;  many of us today are losing hope, no matter what our current President’s campaign slogan might have suggested. 

The economy is a big part of that, of course.  Not too long ago it seemed like everyone had a lot of money.  In my neighborhood everyone was spending re-fi money freely as our homes quickly doubled in value.  Anyone who wanted a job could find one.  Now today all that has changed, and doesn’t appear to be changing back any time soon.  But our troubles extend beyond the economy:  what are we going to do about health care?  About the incessant conflicts in the Middle East or in Africa?   And what good is it to avoid losing your home if you don’t really like the people you have to share it with?

Many of us know that sinking feeling that comes when you realize that you are in trouble and probably not likely to escape it in the near future.  Our hope shrivels under those conditions.

The epistle of I Peter was written to people who felt much like that.  The letter was probably written around the early 60’s A.D. by Peter, who probably wrote it from the city of Rome.  In any case, the letter was certainly written in the shadow of Rome, as the threat of Roman persecution looms over the epistle from the not-to-distant future.  The letter was written around the time of the Emperor Nero, under whose persecution Peter eventually lost his life. 

To put it simply:  if you were a Christ-follower in the time of Nero you were in trouble. 

As Christians today we face resistance.  Look at the nerve touched by the recent Tim Tebow Super Bowl ad where his mom simply acknowledged that she loves her son.   But that kind of resistance is really pretty minor in the broader scheme of things.

 First-century Christians faced a whole series of very real troubles.  Troubles from Rome, whose leaders figured that they were atheists, with the way they bristled against worshipping the emperor or his pantheon of gods in favor of this curious invisible non-god they claimed to follow.  From the Jews, who resented being grouped by the Romans in the same atheist group, and did what they could to purge their communities of these aberrant Christ-followers.  And often from their families, since in their day the head of a family determined the religious perspective for everyone.  For a person to begin following Christ in defiance of their family was often taken as a rejection of that family.  Family leaders were known to go to extreme measures to keep their pagan family members in the fold, and following Christ often meant losing one’s family. 

Peter was writing to people who not only had troubles, they were in trouble.   No matter where they turned there were forces arrayed that could destroy everything their lives had been based on.  You can easily become paranoid in a situation like that…except that in your case the threats you face are definitely real.   

So Peter opens his letter to these down-and-outs with a boisterous cheer for the “living hope” that they could share together.  (Look at I Peter 1:3-12 sometime).   Notice, though, that Peter is not even pretending that this hope will protect them from suffering.   No, he candidly acknowledges that suffering is coming their way.  Instead he points to something that transcends their suffering.  As big as their troubles might seem, Peter points them to something bigger.    A “living hope”, an un-depreciated “inheritance”, and the snug security that comes from being “shielded” by God’s power during turbulent times.  Peter then offers a very different perspective on their suffering:  instead of being a setback, he interprets suffering as a force that can “purify” the faith through which we ultimately connect to Christ and all these blessings. 

What Peter is doing is offering a contrasting worldview.  Here’s what a worldview is:  everyone has a center to their world, something around which everything else inevitably orbits.  In the first century it may have been Nero or the power of Rome or the all-star team of Greek and Roman gods that needed to be appeased.  Today our worldviews may be a little more difficult to identify, but we still always have something at the center.  It may be a conventional religion of some sort or it may be something less clearly defined.   It may be finances, or recreation or physical beauty or romance or maybe even the right to view oneself as “a pretty good person”.  In any case there is something at the center of each person’s world.  And in the face of insurmountable forces that could easily destroy every other form of security, Peter points his friends toward something unchanging.  He invites his friends to stomp down with abandon on a foundation that even Nero can’t shake.   He’s not trying to promise that painful things won’t happen; he’s helping them discover something that will still stand firm, even if those bad things might happen.  

So how do you tell what’s really at the center of your worldview?   Ask yourself this:  what would effectively end your life if you were to lose it?  Each of us undoubtedly has blessings in our lives about which we care passionately and for which we would grieve deeply were we to ever lose them.  But there is usually one set of blessings which would ultimately prove to be a deal-breaker for each person.  Deep in our hearts we know that if we were ever to lose our (family, middle-class-wealth, good looks, professional success, etc.) we just couldn’t go on.  Life would prove to be pointless if that central blessing were taken away.

What would that “deal-breaker” be for you?  Peter invites us to dare to imagine something big enough to tower over any other dream we might pursue or any other potential loss we might face.   He invites us to look to Christ and ask Him to fill us with the kind of living hope that comes only when you’re solidly based on something that even a recession can’t take away.

“Got hope?”

Lessons I've Been Learning from 2009

I have a tradition at The Gathering of dedicating my first sermon of the year to sharing some of the lessons God had been teaching me during the previous year.

I’m always a little uncomfortable presenting that sermon because:
a.) Our people get the opportunity to see proof of what they may frequently suspect (that their preacher can be pretty messed-up in side).
b.) Announcing lessons “learned” implies that I've gotten the point. In reality the shelf life for these kinds of lessons seems to be measured in hours, not years, which means that I typically have an awful lot of re-learning going on.

Well, so be it.

Having said that, here’s a summary of what I’m sharing this year.

1. We need to be who God created us to be.
God makes it really clear in the Bible that he has custom-designed each of us for specific purposes which He’s prepared for us to do (I Cor. 12). I’ve known that for a long time, yet it seems like I frequently discover how little I grasp what this really means.

As a pastor, I love seeing how this works. Not long ago I was in a meeting with two of our key leaders. Person A was expressing appreciation for a role Person B had stepped into. “I think it’s so awesome to see how you are able to…” (you get the point). Person B seemed a little flattered, adding how she was amazed every time she saw Person A doing what she did well. They each considered the other to be remarkably gifted and were each surprised to hear the other celebrate their unique contributions.

That conversation just felt very right to me. I love seeing people discovering how they uniquely fit together as we uncover clues as to what God has had in mind for us since the beginning.

In my own situation God has been nudging (OK…shoving) me in a direction that helps me discover just how big of a deal this really is. A lot of my particular learning has had to do with the significance of being an introvert. I’ve been a Meyers-Briggs INTJ since way back, and I’ve always suspected that if you click on the word “introvert” you’d see my picture pop up. People are often surprised about that since I talk for a living, but I’ve known that for a long time. Introversion isn’t the same thing as shy: introvert refers to someone whose battery recharges when they’re alone while an extrovert’s battery recharges while being with other people.

However, God’s lead me to read a number of voices during this past year who are helping me discover just how significant this really is in my life. One of these voices is Adam McHugh, who recently published the book Introverts in the Church which has been attracting a lot of attention on the internet.

Here’s the significance for me: I love people, I love what our church stands for, and I love to explore possibilities with people so together we can figure out how to make them happen. Most of my work time is connected to meetings. But as much as I enjoy that, I also find it incredibly tiring. More often than people suspect I’ll finish an all-day run of meetings and find myself weary to the point of tears. As the adrenaline subsides I’ll discover that I’ve given away more than I had to give. I usually push through that, because you do what you have to do, but that kind of fatigue doesn’t help anybody, and it could really screw up my own life if I’m not careful.

At the same time, I’m learning that the best stuff I have to offer in life comes from the things that happen in my solitude. What I bring in preaching, teaching or writing comes from the very things that I need to be healthy. You lock a red-blooded extrovert up in solitary confinement and you’ll have a mess on your hands. You lock me up and chances are I’ll write something that you’ll find really helpful. It’s all part of the same temperament.

So the lesson for me is that I need to be smart about how I spend my time and my energy. It wouldn’t help anyone for me to crash and burn. I need to trust that Christ can take my five loaves and two fish use them to produce whatever kind of meal is needed.

That’s what I’m learning about how I’m wired. What has God been showing you about how He’s wired you? He’s made you to be very unique, different from anyone else who might read this blog. What has He been showing you about the kind situations in which you can really make His dreams come true?

2. I Need to Watch for God’s Presence.
Theoretically, God is everywhere. He’s omni-present, we say. That’s what David was saying in Psalm 139: “where can I flee from your presence?” In a broader sense it’s impossible to escape the presence of God. Just ask Jonah.

On the other hand there is a unique sense of flourishing that comes from being deeply connected in relationship with him. Jesus described it as being like a vine with branches (John 15). We were created to live life with an ongoing connection to God: seeing life through His eyes, going through our days with His passions beating in our hearts. That’s what I’ve been exploring at a deeper level lately.

Here’s one thing I’ve been discovering: joy is one of the by-products of this Presence. I think of it as the God’s cologne which lets you know he’s somewhere in the immediate vicinity. Joy is different than happiness: happiness is a temporary delight from temporary circumstances. Joy is a lasting sense of well-being that will outlast temporary circumstances.

I’m learning to take that sense of His joy more seriously. Joy is important because it’s good. Grin for grin it’s a better value than happiness and a lot less fragile.

But tracking joy more closely also tends to unearth some weird stuff that can distort my worldview. For instance, I tend to get spooked by my own unhappiness. If my internal weather report is cloudy I’ll begin to assume that things are going badly in life. That’s actually a pretty atheist/humanist kind of approach. It assumes a bunch of things that don’t sync with the gospel very well: that events in life need to meet my approval, that I’m the one who’s best-qualified to judge what’s good or bad in life, and that my happiness index should consistently rise over time. It puts me at the center.

On the other hand, if I re-accept God’s hand in my world then it becomes easier for me to rest in a general sense that God’s on the job and that Rom. 8:28 somehow still applies. For instance, suppose God should grant me joy tomorrow without providing me with a corresponding degree of happiness? Would I be OK with that?

When I slide in my humanist bad habits I tend to over-value happiness and I begin to freak over each potential unhappy thing that might come my way. In short, I worry. Sometimes a lot. But when I shift my focus to tracking His joy more than I track my happiness I find that things change. Then I can be OK without having to be happy. That tends to make life a lot easier in a world that sometimes refuses to bend to my will.

Here’s what lies behind the whole discovery of joy: God really loves me, loves us. It’s not simply that God approves us or accepts us or even if committed to us whether He happens to like it or not. The mystery of the Gospel inevitably leads us to the startling discovery that God is awfully fond of you, and of me. When we come to terms with that everything else in the Christian faith becomes a lot easier. But until we dare accept his heavenly hug everything else in the Bible seems like a burden.

I’m not fully there yet…God’s still working on me with that. But he’s still working on me. He used the book The Shack to move me along in this area. I'm slowly getting used to the idea of being really special in God’s eyes.

3. Pride is a heavy weight to carry.
A long time ago I seem to have concluded that I needed to take myself very seriously, since it appeared that no one else was likely to do that for me. And so I developed a habit of being very concerned about how I would do in life, and what people would think of me, how I would come across.

This can be a clumsy trait for a preacher. It’s hard to help people see that God is great when I’m also hoping they’ll notice that the preacher is pretty good. That’s an understandable, maybe even inevitable, concern but it requires a lot of extra energy to worry about.

I’m learning that Jesus has called us to a life that’s a lot easier. As Matthew tells us He calls us to seek first His kingdom, promising that He’ll take care of all our other concerns as well.

I find it’s pretty easy for me to get confused on this point. (As you may have noticed, it’s actually pretty easy for me to get confused on a wide variety of important issues.) Fortunately God has a really effective way of helping me re-center on this point: He leads me into situations where I might not end up looking very good. Perhaps it’s because His particular leading for me may be misunderstood by others, at other times it may simply be due to ways in which I might screw something up. In any case, any dip in the ratings can quickly bring into question whose reputation I’m most concerned. It’s hard to serve both God and reputation.  (Although I’m still hoping you’ll really like this blog post!)

If I were to look for a summary theme through these three lessons I think it would have to do with how big of a God I expect to find in the coming year. God has this way of shrinking or expanding to match our expectations for Him. To the extent that I try to hold my future in my own hands I’ll probably have a rough time of things: I’ll try to be someone I’m not, I’ll fret over my level of happiness and I’ll worry about my reputation. On the other hand, if I’m following a God who has created me to fit exactly into His good plans, who is committed to sustaining me in His joy and will grant me whatever level of success is needed for me to be accomplish my mission…well, then I’ll be set for the coming year.

How about you--I'd love to hear comments about what God's been teaching YOU.

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.