Here I Am To Worship

I've been thinking this week about worship. What it is and what it isn’t.

I've been reading Romans 12:1 and remembering that worship is bigger than the hour set aside to pray and sing and share communion. Worship isn’t simply giving praise to God, but a giving of our whole selves as sacrifices to God.

So, if that's true, then why take the hour a week?

When I was a kid, my buddy Mark's dad would drop into town once every couple of weeks, take him out to lunch and a movie and get some "quality time" into a couple of hours. And that was their relationship. A couple of hours every few weeks. And I can tell you, because he told me, it never felt like enough to Mark.

When I was a kid, my family had one night a week that we set aside as family night. We were together all the time, living life together in the same house, but that hour enhanced what was already an amazing family experience. It helped us reorient ourselves, in case we had gotten off track.

I think the hour of worship is meant for us to reorient and rethink, to renew and revere and remember. To put things back into their proper place. Because it takes about a week for me to put myself front and center, my hopes, my dreams, my plans, my problems, my job, my money, my house, my family. In the process, Christ gets off center, sometimes by a little and sometimes by a lot.

If that hour is the only hour I spend with my Father and my Christian family, it will never be enough. Because we're meant to do life together, not just an hour of praise.

But even though worship is an ongoing process of giving myself over to God, that hour of worship is a necessary time for us to remember those things that we too quickly forget. That God is good. That Jesus is Lord. That the loss of a parking space or a job or even a loved one doesn’t change that fact. We don’t come to forget the world outside, but to put it in its place. To be put in our place. And to remember Christ’s place as the center of our lives.

Don't Quit Your Day Job

So, for awhile now, I have been working on the makings of a book whose working title is "Don't Quit Your Day Job: How Tent-Making Saved My Ministry."

While I don't mean to insist that the only way to do effective ministry is bi-vocationally, I do think that one of the most unChristian thing about a lot of church people is that their only meaningful contact is with other church people.

Thoughts?

One In Every Family

I have a confession to make. I've always been really embarrassed by my great-grandfather.

His name was Harold Smith, and he might have had his pleasant attributes, but I never got to see them. From the time I first knew him, he was an angry and unpleasant old man, constantly complaining and arguing.

But the thing that bothered me most was his unapologetic racism. My family has story after story of his ignorant and hateful comments, none worse than those directed at my older brother, Scott.

So, there have been times when I have wished I could have some other history, some other heritage, some other person to claim as mine.

Today I made a great discovery. Harold's wife Bea had a great-grandmother named Laura Smith Haviland. She is my great-great-great-great grandmother. And this is her story.

I could not be prouder of my history and heritage.

Trust and Obey

Had an interesting interaction with Harry today. Was portioning out his lunch and he asked that I let him have all the fruit we have in the fridge. I said no. He asked why. I said that it was too much. He said it wasn't. I said it was and that he'd just have to trust me. He said, "I trust you, dad, I just disagree."

This struck me as how we often come before God. We declare trust in God, but we "disagree" on the specifics. We say that God is all powerful, all knowing, that all that He does and says is right and good.

Then He says, "Love your enemies." Then He says, "Turn the other cheek." Then He says, "Bless those who persecute you." Then He says, "Do not return evil for evil, but overcome evil with good." Then He says, "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth."

And we disagree. We trust, but we don't obey.

Which really means that we don't trust at all.

What The Gospel Is Meant To Offer

Christians preach the gospel of a new King and a new Kingdom, but it can often just be words we use as our lives play out according to old kingdom rules. I'm reading a book titled Child 44 in which the two main characters choose to defy the state while living in Stalin's Soviet Union. I was struck by a particular passage that gets to the heart of our old life in the State (as much for capitalist Americans as communist Russians) vs. our new life in the Kingdom.

It went against her governing principle - survival. She was accepting an immeasurable risk when an alternative presented itself to her. What had changed? Energized, excited, she didn't want to return to her former subsistence existence, wondering how much of her soul she'd have to slice off and sell in order to survive.

Revisiting Values

Our current conversation with Immanuel is one in which we're revisiting the values we set in place 3 years ago. So, the question gets asked, why revisit this/discuss this/think about this? This quote from my brother seemed fitting:

Watch your thoughts, they become words.
Watch your words, they become actions.
Watch your actions, they become habits.
Watch your habits, they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.

Sons of Lwala

Please join the RSC Scholarship Foundation for a very special screening of the award winning documentary “Sons of Lwala” on Friday, April 24, 2009. The screening will take place at the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Center for the Performing Arts in the Debra and Kevin Rollins Theatre. The documentary is the moving tale of two brothers from Kenya who come to the United States to become doctors, and return home to Kenya to finish the clinic started by their late father.

Tickets for the event are available at The Long Center Website for only $10 (plus $2 service charge). Proceeds from the event will benefit the RSC Scholarship Foundation and the Lwala Community Alliance.

Easter

“Anyone can be sentimental about the Nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don’t believe in the resurrection, you’re not a believer.” -from A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving

"There is no middle ground between dead and alive. If Jesus is dead, then his story is completed. If he is alive, then his story continues." 

-from Living Jesus by Luke Timothy Johnston

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.
-Seven Stanzas at Easter by John Updike

Resurrection as metaphor doesn't work for me; "In the beginning was the Word and the Word became flesh and the flesh became metaphor". My problems are real flesh and blood problems. My sin is real flesh and blood sin. The brokenness of creation is stronger than metaphor and the Christ that redeems it must also be. All that's wrong with the world is as real as a punch in the face, a knife in the gut, and an atomic bomb. And so all that is right must be as real as a crucified Christ and a risen Lord and a new creation.

Maundy Thursday and Good Friday

Went to a Maundy Thursday service last night and experienced something I never had in a Maundy Thursday service before. While every Maundy Thursday service has ended with the extinguishing of the Christ candle, last night's was quick to light the candle again within a minute.

I'm not looking to knock this service, but the practice seemed to reveal how unwilling we are to sit with suffering. Even during a service that is meant to force us into a place where we sit with Christ's suffering, we were quick to move on to the next thing.

I don't think that Christians are meant to seek suffering for its own sake, but we are meant to be willing to face it and to sit with others in it. Our unwillingness to sit with suffering negates any credibility we have when celebrating resurrection. We cannot skip to Easter. The pain and suffering of the world will not allow us such a cheap fix. We must get to Easter the same way Christ did, by facing the pain and suffering that comes when pure love encounters a broken world.

As Good Friday begins, let us reflect on the "What if?" of Good Friday. What if Jesus had gone into the ground and had never come out? What must it have been like for those who thought the story was over and that the three years of following had been a waste? Can we sit with that uncertainty and anxiety?

Maundy Thursday

Maundy Thursday is the Christian feast or holy day falling on the Thursday before Easter that commemorates the Last Supper of Jesus Christ with the Apostles. On this day four events are commemorated: the washing of the Disciples' Feet by Jesus Christ, the institution of the Mystery of the Holy Eucharist at the Last Supper, the agony of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the betrayal of Christ by Judas Iscariot.

You may never have been betrayed by a close friend and, if not, I pray that you never are. It has only happened to me once, and it was one of the most painful experiences I have ever had. It cut so deep that the two of us never spoke again.

And so I am struck by the fact that Christ, knowing that He was about to be betrayed by Judas, still shared that last supper with him. Still broke bread with him. Still washed his feet.

Maundy Thursday is when Christ's command to love our enemies seems most real to me. I understand that the cross was His greatest moment of suffering, but He manages, in the midst of it, to cry out to God, "Forgive them, they don't know what they're doing."

Judas knew what he was doing and Jesus knew he was going to do it. And yet He still loved Judas and acted lovingly towards him, a servant right until the end. It's something I struggle to get my head around. It's love I find it almost impossible to understand, let alone emulate. It is truly amazing grace.

Holy Week and Lent

I am certain that underneath their upmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love.

-John Steinbeck

If there is one thing to be learned by Christ's temptation in the wilderness, it is that we cannot get the right thing the wrong way.

Holy Week

Ever since I first started practicing Lent, this week has always weighed heavy on me. The week that begins with cries of "Hosanna!" and ends with cries of "Crucify him!"

I find myself wanting to skip to Easter instead of moving through the pain and betrayal that I know is coming. The pain and betrayal that I know I'm complicit in.

There are those who make so much of the crucifixion that they forget about the joy of resurrection. They make God out to be a sadist and Jesus a suicidal masochist.

But there are others who want to skip to Easter. Who promise that a life lived in obedience to God is one lived free of pain and suffering. But Christ promises a cross for all those who follow. Not because He's a sadist, but because this world punishes goodness and honesty and justice and mercy and humility and holiness.

So we take this week as it comes. We sit at the supper filled with confusion and grace. We sit in the garden filled with distress and faithfulness. We sit at the cross of suffering and sacrifice. And we remember. And we wait.