Living Large: Looking for More in an Age of Less (Part 1)

I've been reading from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes lately, in fact I'm been doing a sermon series on it.  Fascinating book.  Strange book.  Dark, even.  (Perfect for us Calvinist types.)

The book of Ecclesiastes is brought to you by the word Meaningless and by the concept of Futility, (“Undermining life dreams since Genesis 3”). The opening words of the book: “Meaningless! Meaningless! says the Teacher. And then, in case we hadn’t gotten the point: “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” You get the point.

In its opening chapters the book of Ecclesiastes seems to offer very little hope, but by the time you reach the close of the book you find…well, very little hope.  We’re pretty much reminded that life is short and death is inevitable. Not the kind of passage that a guy like Joel Osteen usually dwells on.  Actually most of us who spend time in the pulpit usually clear a wide berth around this part of scripture. 

But the book of Ecclesiastes has something genuinely life-giving to offer.  It provides a healthy dose of skepticism in an age of naïveté.  It’s amazing how easily intelligent folks like ourselves can find ourselves falling for some flimsy myths about what really matters in life.   If all we follow are the ads on TV we’ll spend the better part of our lives straining after things that, while they might give us whiter teeth or better hair color, don’t really do anything to make our lives richer or more satisfying.  Ecclesiastes pushes back against all this silliness, offering a reality check. 

I find it helpful to pair the book of Ecclesiastes with something like the Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel of Matthew.  They make a great combination:  Ecclesiastes shows us what doesn’t really matter and the Sermon on the Mount points us towards what does.

Ecclesiastes 2 walks us through the author’s mid-life explorations.   Solomon (or whoever wrote the book from Solomon’s perspective) traces for us all the various places he’d looked in his search for something meaningful.   The chapter reads like the California experience:  food, sex, money, accomplishments, fame:  he tries it all and finds that each of these comforts leaves him with a nagging sense of emptiness.   Nothing really seems to scratch the itch.

Now most of the people who would ever bother to read Ecclesiastes would quickly agree with this assessment.  Of COURSE those kinds of things aren’t really going to satisfy, and OF COURSE only God can really meet the needs of our deepest hearts, etc. etc. etc.  We know that those are the right answers, of course.

And yet, most of us Bible-readers spend just as much energy pursuing these things as anyone else:  we want bigger TVs as much as anyone else, and we churn with many of the same sexual fantasies everyone else does, and we knock ourselves out trying to get ahead with the same fervor as the materialist down the street.  We just take a break from it all to go to church on Sunday.   OK…on most Sundays, at least.  The fact is most of us church-going folks take our upgrades just as seriously as anyone else. 

What do you think God thinks of our “pursuit of happiness”?   Some might suggest that God just scowls down on our little pleasures, like the dour couple in Grant Woods’ American Gothic.  The rest of us snicker, because surely God isn’t that Puritan, but it’s a bit of a nervous snicker as we’re not entirely convinced in the matter.

So what DOES God actually think of our pursuit of pleasure?

It’s at right about this point that our discussion usually takes a sharp right turn into questions of morality.   Is it OK to do this or drink that or watch this?   We try to figure out the rules so we can know which pleasures are all right and which we should feel guilty about.   Once we figure out the rules we go for it.

But there’s a bigger, deeper issue that lurks underneath these questions of morality.   We need to learn to ask why these pleasures are so important to us.  On the one hand, the answer is obvious.  By definition pleasures are…well, pleasurable.  If we didn’t enjoy them they wouldn’t be pleasures.

Sometimes our pleasures are merely a matter of entertainment.  “Oh..that sounds fun…”  But sometimes we pursue pleasures not simply to enjoy, but also to compensate. We can begin to feel like we need our pleasures.   We end up rummaging for pleasures like teenage boys rummaging through the fridge before dinner: “I need something…I’m starving!” 

There are telltale signs that can sometimes show when this is happening.   One sign is irritation.  When part of our world begins to collapse because we have been denied a pleasure that’s a pretty good sign that there’s more going on than mere enjoyment.  Another sign is a growing pressure to compromise scriptural standards.   When we start to feel like we have to bend the Bible’s teachings on our enjoyment of pleasures because we need food or TV or alcohol or sex—that’s also a pretty good sign that something is out of balance.

So what does God think of our pursuit of pleasure?   Here’s where the Sermon on the Mount can serve as a sequel to the book of Ecclesiastes.  The one leads to the other.

The Sermon on the Mount addresses the issue of pleasure from a completely different point of view.  Matthew 5 begins with what we know as the Beatitudes.  In Mt 5:4 we read:  “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”

Now frankly…this sounds pretty stupid.  Blessed are those who grieve, who are unhappy, because they will be happy.   (This is one of those passages that are probably important for other people to take seriously, but certainly not us.)   After all, why would you ever want to encourage someone to mourn? 

 

That’s a good question, actually.   Why would you?

Lurking behind passages like this is the dark reality that many of the desires that we have in life often prove to be frustrating and unsatisfying.  All too often when we get what we want we discover that that wasn’t what we had really wanted.  It might have been good, but it wasn’t it.  You’re convinced that you’re dream vacation would make all the difference in your life, but when you actually got the chance to take it you discovered that when you returned home you were still just the same old you, but with a suntan.  You couldn’t wait to get the new job or the new spouse or to start your family or send your kids out, but once those things happened you soon realized that your life still felt exactly the same as before except you were surrounded by different people.

Here’s something else:  often the more fiercely we pursue these pleasures the more disappointed we end up in the end.  Ask the college student whose week of spring break debauchery left him feeling both cheap and broke a week later.   Ask the young mom who was convinced that getting rid of the guy she married would do it, and she now wakes up each day realizing the havoc she has caused for so many people.  Ask the parent who watches his children grow and leave the house as near strangers to him, and he suddenly discovers the true cost of all those evening meetings and business trips that it took to build his career.   Often the more fiercely we pursue our pleasures the more fierce our disappointment when those delights don’t prove to be it. 

There’s a word for that kind of disappointment.  Do you know what it is?   Mourning.   Blessed are those who discover what doesn’t really satisfy, because they can then begin to find what really is it.

That’s why the Sermon on the Mount provides such a great sequel to Ecclesiastes.   If Ecclesiastes helps us discover what doesn’t satisfy, the Sermon on the Mount points us towards what really does.   Read Matthew 6:  “Don’t store up for yourselves treasures on earth where thieves can steal and  moth and rust destroy.   Instead store up for yourselves treasures in heaven…for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Jesus’ point is clear:  we’re going to inevitably pursue someone’s kingdom, whether our own carnal interests or His eternal cause.    But only one Kingdom will prove to be it.  

So what might this grieving look like for you?   Here are three things that I’m finding helpful:

Become a skeptic.    I’m slowly learning to be a bit cynical towards things that probably won’t satisfy in the long run.  The ads on TV that broadly hint that if I buy a certain product I’ll become popular or sexy or envied by all my friends.  The stray desires that suggest that if my car were classy enough or my home were impressive enough that then I could really enjoy things.  Ecclesiastes helps me learn to roll my eyes at some of the ads I see on TV.

Identify our underlying needs.  I may know what I want, but do I know what I really want?  I may be reaching for more of those chocolate chip cookies, but what I’m really hungering for is some comfort because I’m frightened or tired.  It may seem like I really want to upgrade my car stereo or my TV or my backyard, but what I really want is simply to feel impressive. 

Finally, I need to learn to claim good gifts from God.  God may or may not want me to upgrade my landscaping or get a bigger TV, but he does want me to feel loved, to feel important and to know that it’s good to be me.   I’m finding that I often sell him short when it comes to many of these underlying needs.

Every once in a while, though, I have these flashes of clarity where I’ll realize that the stuff I fantasize about wouldn’t really do it anyway, and it will hit me again how much I long to be filled with God’s best for me.   When that happens God grins, shows me His best, and I discover that I’ve been comforted.

Hmm...just like He said.

Easter: Finding the Remote

(Part 2 of a series).
I sometimes wonder if one of the most significant inventions of the 20^th century was the TV remote. 

I remember “back in the day” when my little brothers and I would have to get up off the couch and manually walk across the room and clunk our way around the dial when it was time to watch Hogan’s Heroes, or maybe C.H.I.P’s.   Once the show started it was, like, “Sssshhh….”  if my mom tried to say anything, because we didn’t want to miss anything important.

Today everything is different, thanks to this little device.  Not only do husbands and wives have an entirely new collection of arguments to engage in, (give me that remote!) but the very way we watch TV or movies has changed.  Did you know that this little guy can even pause live TV?   That’s right.  Jack Bauer can be right in the middle of tracking down some bad guys with their stolen uranium rods, and he has to stop when we tell him to!  Uh…hold it right there, Jack, I gotta go to the bathroom.  ("Chloe--I'll call you back.")  And if something else comes up, Jack will just stay there holding his cell phone while we take care of whatever we might have considered more important than an impending nuclear disaster.  Then, when we give the word he’s off again saving the Big Apple for all America.   (Bhmh-bhmh!).

You see, for the first time in history, this little device has snapped the unyielding one-step-at-a-time link between the events in a story.  Our stories don’t have to unfold one scene after another in steady succession.  Now we have the liberty to st…..      (click remote)

                                      (click remote again)              …op for as long as we want before resuming the story.  We can even jump back to the beginning to pick up a clue we might have missed or even jump to the end of a pre-recorded show. 

You know, this can really mess things up if we’re not careful.  You can get an entirely wrong idea of what’s going on in a story.   Back to our buddy Jack Bauer—if one of my sons pauses the show just as Jack is having some terrible things being done to him with jumper cables it’s going to look really bad.  Every time I walk through the family room there he is getting beat up.  Again.  WOW…sucks to be him…   Eventually my impression of Jack Bauer may begin to change.  Every time I see him he’s getting hammered on something awful.   I’ll eventually start to figure that he must be some kind of wimp, unable to take care of himself in the big bad world of international terrorism. I may even start losing my faith in our buddy Jack.   Man, he’s washed up.  He’s done for.

Now, if you ever watch the show 24 you know that that’s not really true.  Jack Bauer is actually awesome.  Terrorists quake at the sound of his name.  In fact, Jack pretty much died not too long ago, but even that couldn’t stop him.  Before you could say “conspiracy” he'd be back, ready to rock on completely with some brand new components. 

But here’s the thing—if I got stuck halfway through the story, I wouldn’t know any of that.  I’d miss it completely.  I’d never see that through some blend of courage and cleverness Jack would not only get out of his latest difficulty, but he’d actually get the best of the guy who at one time seemed to have him licked.   And I’d never discover the fact that the bad guy wasn’t really such a big deal after all.  He may have looked like a big scary bad guy, but he was really nothing more than a bully with a funny accent.  No big deal.

But wow…if I hit “pause” at the wrong place I could miss all that.  

The same thing can happen if we hit "pause" before we get to Easter.  If we stop the action after Satan's infiltration of Eden, or the struggles of the nation of Israel, or the exile years, or--worse yet--Gethsemane or the crucifixion outside Jerusalem.  The Bad Guy looks pretty powerful as God stands there apparently dumb-founded by the treachery wrought by His people.

But if I can remember to his "play" again I can see where the story goes from there.  A tomb broken open on Easter morning, followers drawn back together, the church bursting to life on Pentecost Sunday, and the Roman Empire turned upside down.  Eventually Revelations gives us a fast-forward look at Christ's second coming: "I will wipe away every tear from their eyes."  The bad guy is gone.

I need Easter.  It gives me a chance to hit "play" again.

Now where was that remote?

Easter: The Last Laugh

(Part 1 of a series.)

The hardest part of Good Friday is probably the most obvious--the story ends in death.  Christ’s death.  His final screams of agony, the nervous scrambling of those huddled in the darkness around those torture poles, they all lead up to that one awful moment when Jesus “gave up his spirit”.  Finally, after all this, it was finished.  And then…nothing.  Nothing but a grotesque corpse to be taken away for grieving.

What goes through your mind when you’re one of Jesus’ loved ones, seeing that battered corpse released from that cross?   What do you cling to as you receive it, wrap it and start to figure out what to do for a tomb?  Do you try to think about the better days?  About the times you had together?  Or does the cruel fact of the silent corpse in front of you simply mock any memory you might try to pull up?

There’s a really weird kind of emptiness that comes after death, isn’t there?  We’ve all felt the chill of that emptiness—losing parents, loved ones, friends.  It leaves a silence that can seem deafening, its silent thunder triggering an avalanche of things we wish would do or re-do or un-do one more time.  Death is just so…permanent.  That’s why we fear it so much.   That’s why we try not to even think about it.  Death looms like a cloud bank on each of our horizons.

Death has this way of mocking us, like the way coming term papers can taunt even the best day of spring break.   Death mocks life.

But here’s the thing.  Jesus’ death was the death of death.  

He broke death, taking its worst only to come back out the other side a few days later.  The permanence of death was shattered.  In its place hope could appear.  That awful silence of the cemetery broken by the rumble of an earthquake and a rush of angels’ wings.  And on Sunday we’ll celebrate how the story comes out.

So here’s the thing:  death mocks life.  But Easter mocks death.

Ha!!

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.