Live Generously

This is the second entry in an occasional series of reflections that I am doing on the book of Colossians.  The first entry, along with a brief explanation for why I am doing this, can be found here.

I will admit that I often find myself asking the question “what’s the point?”, when it comes to church.  Not in the why-do-we-even-bother sense, but more in the what-sort-of-a-difference-is-all-of-the-stuff- that-we-say-and-do-and-talk-about sense.  I suppose that comes from my desire to do more than just play church, and to instead really do work necessary to think through what sort of a difference church activity, spiritual disciplines, and other such activities are supposed to make.  Whether or not those sorts of questions that were on his mind when he was writing Colossians, Paul addresses them nicely in chapter 1, verses 9-10.

“And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.”

What an amazing prayer that is.  Allow me to take one part of it at a time.

“…asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will…” The idea of ‘the will of God’ gets a lot of play in church, as it should.  On some level, all of us want to know the will of God.  Obeying the will of God may be a whole different story (too often it is for me), but I believe it would be fair to say that all of us who believe in the God of the Bible are at least marginally curious as to what his will is, particularly for our lives.  While I certainly have not cracked the code on how to determine the will of God (and would be slightly suspicious of anyone who claimed that they have), I would suggest that the choices we make, and the way in which we control our influences effects how accurately we can know and understand God’s will.  That, in my view, is a major reason why spiritual disciples such as Bible study, prayer, meditation, and church fellowship are important.  It is in those contexts that our curiosity regarding God’s will is transformed into a revelatory searching for God’s will. From those disciplines comes a sort of “spiritual wisdom and understanding” that I believe can hardly be found outside of such communion with God.  It is in our willingness to devote ourselves to these disciplines that the rubber meets the road, so to speak.  In other words, they are an indicator of our desire to know, understand, be transformed by, and apply God’s will.

Furthermore, I would suggest that this “spiritual wisdom and understanding” is something that can be applied in virtually every arena of life.  It can aid us as family members, as employees, as employers, as students, and in virtually any other situation.  I am realizing more and more that as a college pastor it is my desire not to get the students in our ministry to do more things, but instead to engage in determining what it looks like to be Christian in the contexts that they already find themselves in.  In other words, I want them to work through (as I try to do myself) how being Christian effects the way you go to school, or manage a grocery store, or work in a city parks and recreation office, or manage a golf course, or perform any of the other vocations that are represented in our community on Sunday nights.

And now I’ve got to go to class, so I’ll have to finish this post later…hopefully later on tonight…

“If Pharisees were around today, they’d probably be bloggers. That’s not to say that bloggers are Pharisees, but where else can you flex your theological muscles, criticize, and then stand back and see what everyone else thinks about what you said?”

-A paraphrase of what Reggie Joiner said this evening at the Orange Conference in Atlanta, where my wife is this week. There’s probably more truth in that than I’d like to admit, haha.

I received an e-mail today from Sojourners that I thought I would also share on here. I would encourage you to follow the link at the bottom and urge your congressperson to vote to ensure that hungry people around the world are able to receive rice in the quickest and most cost effective manner. While I understand the need to stimulate our economy, it simply does not make sense morally to pursue economic stimulus in a way that keeps the poorest of the poor hungry. I would encourage you also to pray for our nation’s leaders that they would pursue a policy that would benefit the least of these.

You’ve probably seen the headlines about record food prices, which have led to deadly violence and panic across the globe.

The U.N. Secretary-General said last week that the situation has “become a global crisis,” and the World Food Programme is warning of a “silent tsunami” of hunger. Even here in the U.S., grocery stores are starting to ration sales of rice.

Sadly, this desperate situation is being worsened by our own government’s policies. While we spend billions of dollars on food for the hungry overseas, Congress requires that all of it be purchased from farmers in the U.S. and shipped halfway around the world — wasting money and delaying the food’s arrival.

As Congress finalizes the Farm Bill, tell them to fix this misguided policy and help feed more hungry people.

It seems so obvious: When buying food for hungry people overseas, buy from farmers nearby — it’s simpler, cheaper, and better for the local economy and environment.

But even as children are at risk of starving to death, Congress has shown more interest in increasing profits for big American agribusiness than in ensuring that we feed as many hungry people as possible.

These policies are decided as part of the Farm Bill, a mammoth but little-known piece of legislation that governs our nation’s agricultural policies. So far, it’s been shaped mostly by a narrow group of farm-state legislators and industry lobbyists — and it’s become so laden with pork-barrel spending that President Bush is threatening a veto.

But our lawmakers have one last chance to get it right before the bill goes to the president’s desk. One simple change could make a dramatic difference in addressing the global food crisis.

Click here to tell your senators and representatives to fix our food aid policies.

Thank you for raising your voice, as we seek to follow Christ in feeding the hungry multitude.

Blessings,

Patty, Michael, Elizabeth, and the rest of the team at Sojourners

Please click on one  of the links above and fill out the brief form to write to your representative.  Thanks.

Today, to be honest, was one of those days.

One of those days that I hear people who have been preaching for a long time talk about.

It was one of those days where, if given the option, I would have gladly crawled into a hole and stayed there instead of giving a sermon.

Don’t get me wrong, my reasons for feeling that way were completely my own issues, not anyone else’s. I had no one to blame but myself.

I had a bad attitude for most of the day, I was uncharacteristically (I hope) short with one or two people today (which I feel terrible about), I was distracted, irritated, selfish, and simply not in a good place. Honestly, the last thing i wanted to do was bare my soul for 40 minutes to a large group of people. I felt like I had nothing to give.

And now sitting here unwinding at the end of the night, I look back on the night and see it as yet another reminder that I am not the one doing the giving. We had, in my opinion, a really great night tonight. The band did a wonderful job and we had two great times of worship, and I felt like we had a great discussion about one of the more famous stories in the Bible, that of the rich young ruler. Afterwards I had many more people than usual come up to me and thank me for the message and say that they really appreciated it. It was as though God knew what I needed to hear. I went into the night discouraged and feeling defeated before I even opened my mouth. And yet God was able to use me to communicate some truth tonight about the need for us as followers of Jesus to live generous lives, and it appeared that somehow the words that came out of my mouth struck a chord with people.

It reminds me of this great, albeit rather odd, little passage in 2 Corinthians where Paul is talking about a ‘thorn in his flesh’ that was given to him to essentially keep him humble. Paul says how he pleaded with God to take the thorn away, but that God replied, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

Yet another example of the somewhat backwards yet altogether beautiful values of the kingdom of God. Power, God’s power, is made perfect, not in talent, ability, perfection, strength, or anything else of the sort. It is made perfect in weakness. Add that to the list: joy being found in self-denial, fulfillment being found in generosity, little children being the example for usefulness within the kingdom of God, grace. These radically counter-cultural values simply do not make sense apart from the reality of God’s redeeming work through Jesus Christ and his continuing work in the world through his Spirit.

Tonight it sure seemed like God’s power was made perfect in a selfish guy with a bad attitude. Tonight was one of those nights where I left thinking I could do this for the rest of my life. I am grateful to a God that takes my meager loaves and fishes and makes something good out of it, and to a community that somehow knows when their pastor needs some grace and encouragement and gives him both.

Brett and the band played this great song called “Your Love Is Strong” by Jon Foreman tonight. The bulk of the song consists of a delightfully Switchfooty interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer, and the chorus of the song seemed like an appropriate way for me to end this post, as I have experienced its truth deeply tonight.

Your love is

Your love is

Your love is strong

Over the past several months I have studied the New Testament letter to the Colossians fairly extensively. It has emerged as my favorite of Paul’s letters, and I find myself reading at least a passage of it (usually from the third chapter) nearly every day. I am preparing to produce an audio devotional series based on Colossians, and may even make a meager attempt at a devotional book some time down the line, but before I do that, I wanted to take some times to simply reflect on whatever the text of this jewel of a letter brings to mind. So then, periodically over the course of the next month or two, I will devote a post to my reflections on certain texts in Colossians. I won’t be using commentaries, Bible dictionaries, New Testament introductions, or anything of the sort (that will come later), I’m simply going to talk about my own reaction to the text itself, for better or for worse.

Colossians 1:3-4: “We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints.”

I have used those verses (or the several like them found in other NT letters) in countless devotionals, Bible studies, mentoring groups, and sermons over the course of the last several years, and yet I am still struck by them every time I read them. Paul is likely hundreds of miles away from the church is Colossae, and what has he heard about them? He has heard about their sweet sound system and their pastor who tells funny stories. He has heard about how pristine their lobby is and how well their $20 million building campaign is going. He has heard about how the church is a hip cool scene where people have, like, tattoos and piercings and stuff. Or he has heard none of those things. He has heard that the people in the church have faith in Jesus and they have love for one another. That was what most struck whoever brought the report to Paul.

Passages like this always make me ask myself, “what do you want to be known for?” The reality is that I want to be known for a lot of things. Many of which really don’t matter that much. On a corporate level, we can ask “what do we want our church to be known for?” And again, if we’re honest we admit that there are a lot of things that we want our church to be known for. One thing I appreciate about my church is our professed desire to be a church that is a good neighbor to its community. In a world where, more often than not, churches have become eye sores and inconveniences to the unbelieving world, I can’t help but wonder how the public reputation of the church was that it was a place where people had faith in Jesus and truly loved each other.

I’m reminded of a quote from Cardinal Avery Dulles in his brilliant little book (with an admittedly boring title), Models of the Church. In it he writes, “In the early centuries, the Church expanded not so much because of concerted missionary efforts as through its power of attraction as a contrast society. Seeing the mutual love and support of Christians, and the high moral standards they observed, the pagans sought entrance into the Church. If the same is not happening today, this is largely because the Church no longer appears conspicuously as the community of the disciples, transformed by its participation in the new creation.” (italics mine…it also bears mentioning that ‘pagan’ is not meant to be a derogatory term, it simply means non-Christian and non-Jew)

In other words, it was the reputation of the church, not its cool buildings, not its consumer products full of pictures of beautiful and trendy people, not even its amazing missions program, that gave the church its vitality in its early years.

I think about that and then I think about Seven24. The way we teach, the things we emphasize, the way our worship services are designed. And of course that causes me to wonder if people would speak of our community in the same way that whoever was informing Paul spoke of the church at Colossae. The answer is most certainly no.  That’s not to say that we don’t have faith in Christ (we do), and it’s certainly not to say there isn’t a deep sense of community (there is), but I do believe we still have room to grow in those areas.

I am challenged by texts like this to work towards making our community one with that sort of reputation. I should say that I don’t really like that last sentence, as it seems to imply that I consider this to be something entirely up to me, or entirely under my control, which I don’t. The real issue it seems is being willing to ask the question, “what kind of people are we becoming?”, because the reality is that our actions reflect our values and produce our reputation. What would it look like for the church, any church, to be laser focused on having faith- not just professed faith, not just the sing-worship-songs faith, but I’m-really-going-to- wholeheartedly-follow-the-radical-way-of-Jesus faith- and truly genuinely loving one another?

The reputation would be different. That much is sure.

The candidate that I am currently supporting for president is “pro choice” in the traditional sense. Over the course of my life I’ve supported several such candidates. I myself am passionately pro-life. Said candidate has repeatedly affirmed their firm conviction that decisions regarding abortion ought to be made between women and their doctors. I have been in a number of conversations with Christians who ask how I can support a candidate who is “pro choice” when it comes to abortion. My answer is usually a relatively simple one: I believe this candidate is ultimately pro life. This candidate recognizes the evil that abortion is, and yet recognizes that getting rid of it is not a matter simply of legislation. There is far more to it than that. This candidate wants to eliminate the causes of abortion, and wants to do so in a way that recognizes that that requires more than just a law. Furthermore, this candidate opposes the war in Iraq, this candidate supports making health care more affordable for lower class Americans, and has other positions that, in my view, are very pro life. Being pro life is about having, as Jim Wallis says, (and I’m pretty sure he borrowed this statement from someone else), “a seamless garment of life.” It’s about respecting the right to life and quality of life from birth (and pre-birth) all the way to death, regardless of nation of origin or socioeconomic status.

As Christians I believe we ought to respect and affirm the fundamental dignity of all human life. We ought to recognize abortion for the moral evil that it is, while at the same time recognizing that being consistently “pro life” is more than what one believes about abortion. What got me thinking about all of this was a great article called Sacred Reality that I found on the Burnside Writers Collective. It’s a beautifully written piece that, in different terms, discusses what it means to be more holistically pro life. I could write more, but instead I will point you to that article, which articulates this point of view far better than I could.

I am quickly becoming a big fan of Relevant magazine. It is a refreshing change from the status quo of the Christian media culture, and publishes interesting articles about, as their cover advertises, God, life, and progressive culture.  I appreciate the magazine’s ability to talk about matters of faith in a real way while remaining very much, well, culturally relevant.  Their cover stories are always great, but this issue’s was particularly good.

The story was called 7 Burning Issues, and it featured questions related to injustice, war, consumerism, faith, culture, politics, and gay rights.  You know, standard fare, nothing too difficult or controverisal ;-). To make it even better, the panel answering the questions included Brian McLaren, Shane Caliborne, N.T. Wright, and Jim Wallis, four of my favorite authors/thinkers/cool guys whose books you should all read. Their answers were all really fantastic…here are a few excerpts that really stuck out to me, with my comments in italics (hopefully this isn’t illegal!).

Wallis on social justice: “The message to Christians today is very clear.  Any gospel that isnt good news to poor people simply isn’t the Gospel of Jesus Christ; any evangelism that doesn’t include social justice ignores the perfectly integrated life and message of Jesus.

The false dichotomy of evangelism and social justice simply has to be overcome if either are going to have any sort of significant impact.  I’m reminding of a professor I had at Fuller last quarter who said that Christians must learn to “lead” with social justice, honesty, integrity, humility, and values of that sort, because if we simply “lead” with the four spiritual laws in a culture that doesn’t really much care we aren’t going to get anywhere.  That also kinda sounds like something Hal said yesterday morning in church…good works lead to good will that leads to the hearing of the good news.  There’s a lot of truth to that, and there is also a lot of truth to the idea that to be Christian is to be a person of good works.

McLaren on how we should respond to homosexuality: “When the issue of homosexuality comes up, people quickly say, “What about Romans 1? What about Leviticus?  What about 1 Corinthians 6?” I want to say, “Well, what about 1 Corinthians 13? What about James 3?”

McLaren is right on here.  Passages like 1 Corinthians 13 and James 3 must be our criterion for interpreting passages like Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6.  Does that mean we ignore what Romans 1 and 1 Cor. 6 say?  Certainly not.  It does simply mean that we seek to show love first.  Period.

Claiborne of interacting with culture: “part of what I think we have to do is not just figure out how we interact with the culture,  but create a new culture where we bring one another to life and call each other to the best of who God wants us to be.  So it’s not “How much secularism can I get away with?” but “How can I be set apart is a way that celebrates the distinctiveness of who we are as people in this world who are resident aliens?”

That point is absolutely huge.  At the end of the day it’s really about us as Christians changing the questions we are asking.  He is right to point out that many of us, myself included, are often seeking how much ’secularism’ or ‘worldliness’ we can ‘get away with’, which in my few reflects a major problem with our hearts.  It’s as if our goal is to resemble the world most closely, rather than setting ourselves about from the world for the purpose of living as the people of God.  I guess the question then becomes, are we willing to hold ourselves to the high standard that a new way of thinking would require of us?

And finally, N.T. Wright on money: “Money becomes a god very, very easily.  So giving it away cheerfully and wisely is a step towards really saying money is not the ruling force in our lives.”

I’m currently listening to an amazing series of messages by Andy Stanley at North Point Church where he is talking all about the heart.  One of the messages was on greed. He hammered home the point that prioritized, percentage giving is probably the most effective means of countering greed in our lives.  He added weight and credibility to the point by adding that if people are skeptical of him then they can give somewhere else.  He and Wright and correct is saying that the only way any of us can hope to get a handle on our greed is to make giving a priority.

So those are just a few small excerpts.  I highly encourage you all to pick up this issue and read the full article.  That’s all from me for now…I’m going on a mini technology fast now, so I won’t be back online until tomorrow afternoon.

Admittedly the video that I link to below is a few months old, but I just came across it for the first time thanks to a brief write-up it received in the most recent issue of Relevant.

I should say that if I had to make a list of the public figures I would most like to have a conversation with, Stephen Colbert would easily crack the top 10. No really, he would. And I don’t mean the character he plays on TV, I mean the real guy. While I very rarely watch his show (don’t have cable), I find it to be smart, clever, and pretty dang funny. More than that, I find Colbert himself to be both a brilliant actor (his character is amazing), and a fascinating individual (an opinion derived from both his show and the few out-of-character interviews I’ve managed to find). He talks about God quite a bit on his show, often in an either irreverent or tongue-in-cheek fashion, and yet maintains that he is a Sunday school teacher at his church.

In the interview below, he talks with Philip Zimbardo, a professor at Stanford (and conductor of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment that anyone who has ever taken a post-secondary psychology or sociology class has studied ad naseum), about his book The Lucifer Effect. To make a long story short, Colbert seems to slip out of character towards the end of the interview and gives Zimbardo quite the theological lecture. While he uses a rather unfortunate selection of words at the end, the preceding 30 seconds provide an interesting dose of Arminian theology…not exactly standard fare on the late night talk show circuit. The reaction of the audience to his outburst is also intriguing. My interest in what is actually going on in Stephen Colbert’s head has been further piqued.

I couldn’t figure out how to post this video directly onto my blog, but you can find it here.

So it turns out Rob is coming out with a new book.

Jesus Wants To Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile, by Rob Bell and Don Golden

Here is the synopsis of the book found on the Zondervan website:

“There is a church not too far from us that recently added a $25 million addition to their building.

Our local newspaper ran a front-page story not too long ago about a study revealing that one in five people in our city lives in poverty.

This is a book about those two numbers.

It’s a book about faith and fear,

wealth and war,

poverty, power, safety, terror,

Bibles, bombs, and homeland insecurity,

It’s about empty empires and the truth that everybody’s a priest, it’s about oppression, occupation, and what happens when Christians support, animate and participate in the very things Jesus came to set people free from.

It’s about what it means to be a part of the church of Jesus in a world where some people fly planes into buildings while others pick up groceries in Hummers.”

Yikes.

If there is one thing I appreciate about guys like Rob Bell and Shane Claiborne it’s that they tell it like it is.  As I read that synopsis for the first time a few days ago I remember thinking that I can’t wait to read the book.  But then I thought something else, and I didn’t particularly like it.  I thought about how they are the problem.  You know, them. The ones who build $25 million church buildings, the ones who pick up their groceries in hummers, the ones who justify war, and use fear to get people to behave in a certain way.  You know, them.

Reading that synopsis made me want to blame someone else, anybody else.  Because there is a problem and it’s someone else’s fault.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t fault Rob for saying what he said…from what I can tell he practices what he preaches and his voice is often nothing short of prophetic. The points he raises are points that desperately need to be addressed.  The problem is with me and my need to find someone else to blame.  As long as there is a them then I don’t have to worry about we, and I certainly don’t have to worry about I, and how i might need to change, how I might need to look inside myself, and how I might be a part of the very problems I so despise in church, society, and the world.

This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, our need to project problems outwards.  Consider the following: We all know people that we consider to be difficult to deal with, yet few of us consider ourselves to be “difficult”.  We can all point out problems in our churches, but few of us consider ourselves to be actively contributing to said problems.  Many of us agree that we live in a culture of excess, and yet few of us are really willing to admit that we live in excess, and even fewer of us are willing to sacrifice our excess.  Many of us complain about the lack of community that exists in our culture (me being one of them), and yet few of us are willing to do the work to establish real community (I know the names of exactly zero of our neighbors). Many of us complain that large church gatherings of college students and young adults turn into nothing more than “scenes”, yet few of us are willing to do the work necessary to change that culture.

This drives me crazy. And I’m as much a part of the problem than anyone.

The bottom line is as long as we seek to project problems outward without taking responsibility for ourselves, nothing will ever get better.  That’s why I appreciate guys like Rob Bell, who are willing to name problems in society, while at the same time doing the work to be the sort of change that they believe Jesus came to make in the world. I suppose the real issue becomes, how can I live less excessively?  How can I better promote real community? How can I help the church become a real ‘community in exile’, rather than simply a ’scene’?  Progress is found in the I statements and questions rather than the they statements, because it’s really easy to throw rocks, but it’s a lot more difficult to turn the mirror inwards.

My first trip to Mexico was during my sophomore year of high school. Since then I’ve visited our neighbor to the south probably around 10 times, with just about all of those visits being church-related. Going into this weekend, I had never gotten sick in Mexico. I’d seen plenty of other people get sick, but I myself had never had any problems.

That streak has officially come to an end.

As I woke up yesterday morning, it appeared that this visit to Mexico would be somewhat similar to previous visits from a health standpoint. I was worn out from the previous three days (this time even more so since building a house is slightly more physically demanding than playing with kids), I was ready for a shower, but for the most part the trip had been a very positive experience. I was able to actually participate in the construction of a real live house with some great people from our college ministry (Brett wrote a short reflection on the trip and the community aspect of it that I wholeheartedly agree with), and the result of that was that a family of five had an extra 200 square feet of living space that they didn’t have before. It was a great thing to be able to be a part of.

I left our site a little bit early yesterday afternoon with hopes of making it up to Irvine for class at 6:30. It was during our drive to the border that my stomach started churning. I should say at this point that Mike had gotten sick the day before and was still feeling pretty bad, but other than that the group had stayed pretty healthy. We got to the border crossing line, and the stomach churning continued. I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say that stuff went ‘out the in hole’ a total of six times between 4:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., including once in the border line, once on the side of the freeway in Carlsbad, and once within two minutes of walking into my apartment (greeting my wife went something like this: “Hi love, I missed you, it’s good to see you, I need to throw up”…walk to bathroom…”blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh.”) Now having read those last few sentences I realized I didn’t really spare you many details. Sorry.

I was able to sleep last night, and I even made it in to work this morning for our staff meeting, but I’m still not feeling great. I’ve been able to hold down a few Gatorades, but I haven’t dared tried solid food yet. I knew my time would come eventually, and I now most definitely have a ‘getting sick in Mexico’ story. I’m just glad that I got to suffer through the worst of it at home. Other than the sickness, it was a great trip, and it was really cool getting to be a part of building a house for somebody else. I’d imagine we’ll probably have other trips like this in the future, and I look forward to being a part of them…and hopefully staying healthy the whole time.