Connection and Communion

I have 1,193 friends.

At least, that's what Facebook says. It keeps a log of my friends and, by last count, I have 1,193.

I was resistant to Facebook at first. The obvious pluses to Facebook are that it is an easy way to network, to catch up with old friends, and to connect people to events.

The major minus to Facebook is that it seeks to address the deep, human need for connection with a shallow solution. Forget about face to face connections. You can have Facebook.

I often look at that number, 1,193, and wonder how many of these people I have actually met, how many I actually know. I'm a guy who says "yes" to any Facebook friend request, so I have a lot of Facebook friends. But I often wish I could gather them all together at Zilker park and begin to form some real connection.

We humans long for connection. Facebook understands this and it gives us a way to feel connected. But we still often feel disconnected, isolated, and alone. Facebook doesn't cut it.

And, oftentimes, face to face isn't any better. Our connections irl are just as shallow as those we make online. We're too afraid of what it would take to make real and lasting connections.

This is why the act of Communion as always been so powerful to me. If I had my way, we'd share Communion every time two Christians met in the same place. Communion is loaded with connections.

First, it connects us to God. For those of us who often feel disconnected from God, Communion is a place in which Christ connects us to our Father. In the incarnation, Jesus puts a human face on God and makes a face to face connection that we cannot experience otherwise. In His body and His blood, we share a connection and communion unlike any other.

This same Communion connects us to one another. Many of us seek to connect to other people and still wind up feeling disconnected. Relationships that ought to have depth, never seem to go past the shallow end. Billy Joel once described the characters in his classic song "Piano Man" as "sharing a drink they call loneliness, but it's better than drinking alone." Too many of us are sharing that drink, sharing that Facebook outlook that promises "friendship", but offers no meaningful connection. When we share Communion in the blood of Christ, it is a drink that draws us together and fills up the places where loneliness once thrived.

Of course, neither of these connections can happen without the connection of death to resurrection. A lot of us treat Christ like a Facebook friend, requesting friendship, but refusing any meaningful connection. That's because meaningful connection means having to face some things. Face ourselves, face our sin, face our God. Meaningful resurrection means having to die and while everyone wants to go to heaven, no one wants to die to get there. We hope to find the reconciliation of resurrection without having to die to ourselves, our desires, our fear, our pride. And so we miss out on any real connection.

But if we are willing to take the risk that relationship requires, we can be transformed, made new, resurrected, reconciled, connected.

When we are willing to share in Communion with Christ, share in His sufferings, conform to His death, we can begin to experience the power of His resurrection, we can begin to face what must be faced. We can begin to form real connection to God and to one another. 

Hauerwas on Pacifism

I have often been asked why I am a pacifist (though I have often stated that I still struggle with whether there might be Christian exceptions to my pacifism and remain unsure) and heard today a quote from Stanley Hauerwas that pretty much sums up my feelings on the subject:

I am a pacifist so that others will keep me from killing somebody.

Lenten Reading/Cost of Discipleship

During this season of Lent the members of Immanuel will be reading through the first part of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship together. For those who would like in on an online discussion, I will be posting the questions that go with each week's reading/discussion. Here is week one:

Introduction

Bonhoeffer begins his book with three questions:
What did Jesus mean to say to us?
What is His will for us today?
How can He help us to be good Christians in the modern world?
Why is it important to ask these questions? What do they have to do with discipleship?

As you read through the introduction, Bonhoeffer asks almost as many questions as he makes statements. What's one of his questions that you have asked yourself and would like to see answered?

What scripture does Bonhoeffer wrap up his introduction with? Is this the scripture you would expect in a book called "The Cost of Discipleship"? What are your expectations for this book/study?

Lent

The first part of this is appearing in tomorrow's Statesman, but I thought it was worth putting the entire thing here:

Part 1
Why does God hate stuff? That’s the question I was asked once, as the season of Lent was approaching. Lent is a season in which Christians give up stuff for the 40 days leading up to Easter. So the question goes; if the stuff I’m giving up isn’t bad stuff (and, if it is, shouldn’t I give it up for more than 40 days?) than what’s the point of giving it up?

It’s a fair question, and one worth answering as the season of Lent is upon us.

First of all, God doesn’t hate stuff. God isn’t opposed to earthly pleasures, in fact He infuses them with a foundation for meaning. Calls to fasting aren’t meant to deny ourselves of physical things so that we can concentrate on “spiritual” things, but so we can redeem the physical things as spiritual things. Food can become substantive and enjoyable instead of one more thing we shove into a gaping hole. So can entertainment, relationships, sex and other pleasures.

But going back at least to the time of Augustine is the concept of a “God shaped hole” that exists in all of us. Augustine argued that every human being was created with a place inside of them that can only be filled up by the presence of God. He went on to say that humans make the mistake of trying to fill that hole with other things, the things that make them “happy”.

Blaise Pascal argued that the God-shaped hole in the human heart is, in fact, an infinite and terrifying abyss which we try to cover over with all sorts of facades. Then when, eventually, a crack appears in the facade, and we see through it the well of eternal nothingness plunging down forever, we hurl ourselves back in horror. We will do anything to fill that empty space.

So we pour alcohol through the crack in the façade in the hopes of filling the abyss and removing the horror. Of course, any recovering alcoholic will tell you this doesn’t work. Not for very long. Sigmund Freud said in Civilization and Its Discontents that no mood-altering chemicals ultimately perform this job satisfactorily. For a while Freud thought that cocaine could safely do this, and had to learn the hard way, through his own personal experience, that in the long run it worked no better than alcohol.

So we reach for money or sex or power or security. And we discover, either by witnessing it or through first hand experience, these things don’t fill that space either.

Only that which is infinite and completely transcendent, Pascal said, could fill such an infinite abyss.

The Bible says that we cannot love both God and mammon. Mammon is just a word for “stuff” or things. We cannot love both God and things. God is to be loved and things are to be used. And it is increasingly important that we love God and use things, for there is much in our gadget-minded, consumer-oriented society that is encouraging us to love things and use God.

When Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness (this is where the 40 days of Lent comes from), He was tempted by Satan with provision, wealth, and power. The pursuit of happiness. The American Dream. But we are called, as Christ did, to pursue holiness. Jesus’ words to Satan are, “man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” Jesus knows where his blessings come from. His time in the desert has been a reminder of that. He knows to put the giver before the gift.

William Sloane Coffin writes that, “The devil is always suggesting that we compromise our calling by offering us what is good in place of what is best.” He plays on our hunger and he plays on our fear. We’re so afraid to face our own emptiness that we’ll consume anything to make that emptiness go away.

So, in this season of Lent, we follow the example of Christ in the wilderness and make a conscious choice for emptiness.

Now there are many schools of religious thought that teach an embracing of emptiness as the key to happiness. That we must die to ourselves. That a denial of our physical selves will, in and of itself, redeem our spiritual selves. That the physical is bad and the spiritual is good. That is not what Christians proclaim.

We proclaim the physical and spiritual are connected and we witness that in the incarnation of Jesus. If we deny ourselves, it is only so we can take up the cross of Christ. If we die, it is only so we can live again. If we embrace emptiness, it isn’t with emptiness as the end goal, but as a means to an end, experiencing the fullness of God. If we stop grasping at stuff, it is so we can grab hold of God.

I encourage you to give something up this Lenten season. Something you really like. Something you’ll miss. Something that you keeps you from being empty, from facing that abyss. I encourage you to ask God into that time and that place that you normally fill with television or chocolate or shopping. Let this season of Lent be a time when you embrace emptiness in order to better understand the sacrifice of Christ and to be more filled with the Spirit of God.

Part 2
But Lent isn’t just about seeing if you can go without something for 6 weeks or if you can grow closer to God in 6 weeks. Lent is meant to be preparation for something. When Jesus spends His 40 days in the wilderness, it is in preparation for a 3 year ministry that will culminate in a cross. His 40 days weren’t the end of something, but the beginning.

There’s a story that Jesus tells in the gospels about a man who sweeps the demon out of his house. The demon seeks a place to rest and, not finding any, returns to the house to find it unoccupied. Then it goes and talks with seven other spirits more wicked than itself and they go in and live there.

In the 80’s there was an anti-drug campaign that encouraged us to simply “Just Say No” to drugs. While the slogan was everywhere the campaign was, in the long run, ineffective.

Now what do Lent, demons, and failed drug campaigns have to do with each other? They remind us that what you say “yes” to is as important as what you say “no” to.

A lot of folks suffer through 6 weeks of denial and then return to their old habits. But that isn’t the point of Lent. Our self-denial is about putting things, especially the things we deny ourselves for Lent, in perspective. We ought to leave Lent feeling renewed and ready for what comes next. There’s a reason, after all, that Lent culminates in Easter. The dying we do is meant to lead to resurrection.

Let me give you an example from my own life. Two of the things that I do every Lent are to give up television and engage in some sort of progressive fast. That’s because two of the things I take in without thinking are entertainment and food. Lent is a time for me to remember that the stories I take in are meant to teach and inspire, not just to distract and detract. The food I take in is meant to build me up, not wear me down. So I always end up reaching Easter newly inspired about the way I eat and the way I watch TV, usually committed to doing less of both.

But it isn’t enough for me to simply embrace the mantra of less food and less TV. I need to fill that time and space with something good before the something bad comes back with friends. That can be time in prayer or in study, time with my family and my friends. Committing specific time in the evening to getting to know my wife better so that there suddenly isn’t time to watch that Seinfeld rerun I have memorized.

What happens then is that we begin to experience resurrection. Not just resurrection in our own minds and hearts, but resurrection that pours out into our families and friendships. Resurrection that pours out into our workplace. Resurrection that pours out into our neighborhoods. Our communities can be forever changed if we treat Lent as an opportunity not just to rid ourselves of something old, but to begin something new.

A more recent and more effective anti-drug campaign went something like this: : My Anti-Drug. Fill in the blank. Sports. Reading. Family. Friends. Don’t just sweep out the bad stuff. Fill it up with something good.

And make time for the One who is truly good with a capital G, God. Make sure to pray and to study the Bible and to worship and to serve. Find opportunities to draw nearer to God. Find a community that will do these this with you. Then you will begin to experience true resurrection. And those around you will begin to experience it too.

Worship and a Good Mix

Today a friend asked me what advice I would give if I were Rob Gordon describing how to make a good mix. I think the advice he gives is pretty strong, especially the part about "stuff she'd like." I'd say that a good mix should feature a combination of something you know the listener likes and something you like that you think they will like. That way, the mix shows both that you've been listening and that you have something to say. It is a conversation. The point of a good mix is to connect your heart to someone else's heart.

For some reason, describing a mix tape this way reminded me of the importance of putting together a worship experience, because the purpose, while greater, is, at its core, the same. To connect our heart to the heart of God. You want, first and foremost, to honor the recipient, which is God. But part of how you do that is choosing to say things in a way that is specifically meaningful to you.

I don't think I had every thought of planning worship as making a mixtape for God, but I think there's something to it. What do you think?

Or Did Jesus Find Him?

After multiple listens to M. Ward's 2006 release Post-War, I was working under the assumption that Ward had gone looking for the Buddha. 

After multiple listens to today's release of Hold Time, I can only assume that he ended up finding Jesus instead. Or did Jesus find him? The lyrics from Fisher of Men hint at the latter:

And he put his name in my verses and his name in the book
Before I knew what I was cooking, it was already cooked
He's got a line in the water, he's a fisher of men
And he put his name in my chorus, and the dark before the dawn

So that in my time of weakness, I'd remember it's his song

He's got a line in the water, he's a fisher of men

The fisher of men reference is certainly a Biblical one, what Jesus promised He would teach His disciples to be. And that isn't the only Christological reference on the album. The track listing includes songs like Save Me (which I assumed would be about a woman, but is clearly about God) and even Epistemology (the theory of knowing) which features lyrics like:

I learned how to keep my head from something Paul said
About keeping the fruit in the spirit from the chorus down to the hook

I read a review that surmised that "Paul" is a reference to McCartney, but I'm going to guess that the "fruit in the spirit" reference points to apostle and not Beatle.

This album is, musically, my second favorite among Ward's output and, thematically, my favorite. Which means that it could quickly and easily become my favorite M. Ward album.

Still, I am curious if there was a conversion story between '06 and today or if this is something I should go back and look for in all of Ward's songs.

Either way, check out M. Ward's latest album (released today), Hold Time. It's excellent.

A New Beginning...

Rachel and I have been talking about adoption for awhile. As an idea we were both in favor of, we've talked about it since before we were married. As something we might want to pursue ourselves, we've talked and prayed about it for the past few months.

It became a decision we finally made yesterday. Now begins the even longer process of exploring adoption options and going through the formal process of adoption.

Part of my regular blog posts will be describing this process.

As it begins, the two overwhelming emotions are excitement and anxiety. It feels much the same way that I felt days after we said, "OK, let's try and have a baby." Which feels good. Because that decision has turned out to be a great one.

I will be looking for encouragement from all of you and advice from any of you who have personal experience with adoption. 

I am the best kind of scared today. I can't help thinking that our child is on it's way into the world. That it might be here already, just waiting for us to come.

I pray for the man and woman who will bring/have brought this child into the world. I pray for their circumstances and their struggle. I pray for good health. I pray for protection over them. 

I pray for the man and woman who will bring this child into their home. I pray that God will make us wise and that He will produce the fruit of His Spirit in us; self-control, gentleness, faithfulness, goodness, kindness, patience, peace, joy, and love.

I pray for Harry as we go through this experience, that he will continue to know how loved he is and will grow in his own love and anticipation for his new sibling.

I pray for the child who will join our family. I pray for our family, that it will bless this child.

And because I don't know which one will be mine, and because that reminds me that each of them are precious, I pray for every child that needs a family. I pray God's mercy and peace over each and every one of them. And I pray that we might all, in our own way, be agents of that mercy and peace for them.

On Proselytizing

If it’s good news, then we share it. If we believe that the most important thing that can happen to a person is to encounter Christ, that the most important choice they can make is to follow Him, then we cannot keep that to ourselves. If we do, than our time together is nothing more than an opportunity for smug satisfaction.

Da Jesus Book

Sometimes Da Jesus Book says it just right:

Wen we neva have power notting, Christ wen mahke fo all us guys dat wen ack jalike God no matta. Dass da time God wen pick. Eh you know, nobody goin mahke fo one guy dat ony do right kine stuff! If get one guy dat everytime get good heart, maybe bumbye somebody go mahke fo help dat kine guy. But den God wen show how plenny love an aloha he get fo us, cuz same time we was doing bad kine stuff, Christ still yet wen go mahke fo us.

Theological Worldview Quiz

You Scored as Neo orthodox You are neo-orthodox. You reject the human-centredness and scepticism of liberal theology, but neither do you go to the other extreme and make the Bible the central issue for faith. You believe that Christ is God's most important revelation to humanity, and the Trinity is hugely important in your theology. The Bible is also important because it points us to the revelation of Christ. You are influenced by Karl Barth and P T Forsyth. Neo orthodox 86% Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan 79% Emergent/Postmodern 57% Reformed Evangelical 46% Roman Catholic 43% Fundamentalist 43% Charismatic/Pentecostal 36% Classical Liberal 36% Modern Liberal 32%

Do We Want To Be Healed?

A lot of Christians are uncomfortable with talk of demons. We don’t mind it so much when it’s 2000 years removed from us, but we'd get anxious if someone were to come to us saying they have recently been possessed by demons.

And yet, as a culture, we’ve adopted the language of “wrestling with our demons” and “facing our demons.” Whether we mean addiction or sin, we use the terminology to describe our struggle against that which is within us that is trying to destroy us.

But adapted terminology doesn’t mean that we’re any more comfortable talking about our demons. Lust, anger, selfishness, greed, our avarice and apathy and pride and pettiness; these aren’t things we like to address or discuss or deal with.

And often I think we’d be better off if our demons could cry out the way they did when Jesus was around. How much better off we'd be if we couldn’t avoid exposing our sin to one another. If, one night when we gathered together, we were stricken like Jim Carrey in Liar Liar, forced to be honest about our demons, our sins, our struggles. 

I wrote a paper once in college about The Scarlet Letter, and the fact that Hester Prynne, forced to have her sin exposed, finds healing while Dimmesdale, who keeps his sin hidden, is slowly destroyed. I wondered then, and still wonder, is it possible that Hawthorne wasn’t saying that Hester shouldn’t have her sin exposed, but that the rest of us should join her?

Because we like to think of our sin as our business. We like to think that we’ll get this fixed by ourselves, but can’t ever seem to. It makes me wish all our sins were harder to hide. Maybe then we'd be more open to Christ's healing.

Because, much as we might say otherwise, we are a people who avoid healing.

I'm reminded of a story of a healing that is recorded in the 5th chapter of John's gospel:
Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, "Do you want to get well?"

This is the part that strikes me about this story; Jesus asks the man, “Do you want to get well?”

It seems like the stupidest question Jesus could ask. “No," thinks the man, "I sit out at this pool in the hopes of not getting well.” And yet the question is a good one, a great one, an important one. Because the man has gotten used to being the lame man. There’s a certain lifestyle that goes along with it. If Jesus heals him, everything changes. Jesus is, in essence, asking the man, “are you sure you want everything to change?”

Which reminds me of the story, recorded in the Old Testament, of Naman; an army commander with leprosy, who hears from his Hebrew slave about a prophet and healer named Elisha. Naaman goes to Elisha to be healed and is told by Elisha’s messenger to wash seven times in the Jordan river. But Naaman has his own ideas about healing, he expected to meet Elisha and to get a show. Instead he’s given a seemingly mundane task, get yourself dunked in this water. Naaman is about to return home when his wiser servants ask "if the prophet had told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How much more, then, when he tells you, 'Wash and be cleansed'!" So Naaman washes and is cured.

The fact is that all of us want to get better, all of us want to get clean, but on our own terms. But Christ’s healing is on His terms. His healing brings changes and challenges we aren’t always willing to face.

Are we willing to have our sin exposed? Are we willing to make time to pray and to worship? Are we willing to have our entire lives changed? What if the only way to be healed is by dying to our old selves and becoming someone completely new? Are we willing to lose ourselves in the process of finding Jesus? Are we willing to change what must be changed? Are we willing to submit ourselves to God’s will and God’s plan? Do we want to be healed?

Or do we want to continue to try and fix ourselves? Are we so in love with ourselves that we’d rather be sick and unchanged than well and risk change? Are we so committed to getting our own way that we can’t see where our way is leading us?

Because it's leading us straight to Hell. And not necessarily like we think. Christians talk a lot about Hell as the eternal consequence of sin and people start to get the idea of God as one who enjoys sending people to Hell. But God doesn’t want us to burn in hell, He wants to burn the hell out of us.

But we don’t like things that burn. We don’t like how much it hurts sometimes to be healed. When faced with a sort of spiritual chemotherapy, we’ll keep our cancer. The fact is that it is destroying us in such slow and subtle ways that we've almost stopped noticing. And we don't like what comes with getting well. We don’t like the embarrassment or submission or the loss of pride. We don’t want to lose ourselves. We’ve come to enjoy a certain lifestyle and we don’t want it challenged or changed; we don’t want to be uncomfortable or inconvenienced. Or we just don’t want to be honest. We don’t want to be exposed. We don’t want to get real. We don’t want to get well.

Because the first step in getting well is getting real. Giving voice to our demons is the only way to have them cast out. The folks in AA understand this and we must understand it too; that the first step is admitting that we are powerless over our own sin. And the next is acknowledging that God is not. And the next is to make a searching and fearless inventory of ourselves and our sin. And the next is to ask God to remove that sin. And the next is to do whatever God deems necessary to get well and to be healed.

Christ’s question confronts us as we seek to follow Christ. Do you want to get well? Do you want to be healed?

A Good Reminder

Harry walked into my room today and asked, "Hey dad, who is in charge of the whole country?"

"Barack Obama?" I asked, unsure of what he was looking for.

"No dad," he responded, "JESUS!"

Oh yeah. I forget sometimes.

Talking About MY Generation

Remember when you first watched Reality Bites and found yourself frustratedly thinking, "This is supposed to be about ME?"

Maybe you don't. Maybe, for you, being a member of Generation X meant you connected with the sort of character who says things like, "I have a planet of regret" and "I am not under orders to make the world a better place."

Or maybe you resented the fact that this guy was supposed to represent all that is your generation.

That's assuming you even gave it that much thought. I certainly did. Because I am fascinated by the idea of Generation X even as I am repulsed by it. I am convinced that it can be a force for good and disgusted at the caricature it is always in danger of becoming.

Which is why Jeff Gordinier's book, X Saves The World, has so much appeal for me. Well, it's not the only reason. I don't enjoy just anything written about Generation X (exhibit A: Reality Bites), but I do when it is as insightful, as smart, as funny, and as engaging as Gordinier's book.

The subtitle to X Saves The World is How Generation X Got the Shaft But Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking.  The brilliance of Gordinier's book is his recognition of and appreciation for the fact that we, as a generation, have a love/hate relationship with the idea of ourselves as a collective. While we love the idea of being able to do something, we resist the institutionalization and commercialization of whatever it is we might do. There's a high degree of irony even in the title of the book; we are a generation that appreciates irony (and one that hates being labeled as "a generation that...").

What Gordinier does is explore the possibilities of a generation that (there I go again) felt born too late right up until it felt born too early. A generation trying to understand itself while, at the same time, wishing it weren't so obsessed with itself. A generation that would like to put something worthwhile into the world, but wants to do so without embracing a cliche. A generation that gets behind the idea of "Yes We Can" even as it is suspicious of all things chanted.

The title and brevity of the book might make readers mistake it for lightweight. Gordinier's book is anything but. It is passionate, thought-provoking, and thoroughly moving. It isn't trying to speak for a generation and, in not trying to speak, it does speak.

Maybe I can best explain this by sharing a story (we are a generation that loves stories). When I was a senior in high school, I walked into my dad's office with the Alice In Chains album Jar of Flies. My only preface to playing the song "Don't Follow" was to say, "This explains everything." To my dad's credit, he listened to the song and didn't laugh me out of his office. We are a generation trying not only to explain ourselves to ourselves, but to explain ourselves to others.

What I love most about X Saves The World is that I can hand it to my dad and say, "this won't explain everything, but it might clear up some things." And maybe that's a lot of what my generation is trying to do.