9/11

On 9/11 I thought, For the most powerful, militarized nation in the world also to think of itself as an innocent victim is deadly. It was a rare prophetic moment for me, considering Presidents Bush and Obama have spent billions asking the military to rectify the crime of a small band of lawless individuals, destroying a couple of nations who had little to do with it, in the costliest, longest series of wars in the history of the United States.

The silence of most Christians and the giddy enthusiasm of a few, as well as the ubiquity of flags and patriotic extravaganzas in allegedly evangelical churches, says to me that American Christians may look back upon our response to 9/11 as our greatest Christological defeat. It was shattering to admit that we had lost the theological means to distinguish between the United States and the kingdom of God. The criminals who perpetrated 9/11 and the flag-waving boosters of our almost exclusively martial response were of one mind: that the nonviolent way of Jesus is stupid. All of us preachers share the shame; when our people felt very vulnerable, they reached for the flag, not the Cross.

September 11 has changed me. I'm going to preach as never before about Christ crucified as the answer to the question of what's wrong with the world. I have also resolved to relentlessly reiterate from the pulpit that the worst day in history was not a Tuesday in New York, but a Friday in Jerusalem when a consortium of clergy and politicians colluded to run the world on our own terms by crucifying God's own Son.

Will Willimon, presiding bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church

Immanuel

   They say that over 80% of church plants fail. This is the statistic that is shared at church planting labs and church planting conferences and just about anytime church planters gather to talk about church planting. It is the statistic that weighed heavily on my mind when my wife and I moved to Austin, just over 6 years ago, to begin a church plant.

    It was a year after we moved that we finally had a core team of folks ready to think and do church in a different way. Our impulses weren't born from a desire to finally do church "right," but to approach it differently, to go for something more real and raw, simple and small.

    What we did was to plant a house church that eventually became a collection of house churches that gathered separately to focus more intently on discipleship and then gathered together for a time of worship. We were all new to this, my wife and I included, and there was a lot of stumbling and mistakes and correcting and moving forward. A lot of times it felt like one step forward and two steps back, but even that is a kind of moving forward; the kind that teaches patience and perseverance, the kind that forms individuals into a community.

    That is certainly what happened with the Immanuel Austin community. Our house church gatherings came to look like AA meetings, with the goal to become more like Jesus and the understanding being that this is a difficult thing to do. We would often say when sharing our story that there were "no promises of an easy road, just people to walk it with you." We understood that we weren't going anywhere without the promise of "God with us."

    As the years progressed we adopted, as a community, what we dubbed the Immanuel "way of life." It was a list of commitments that we would hold each other to, our version of the 12 steps; things like praying daily and meditating on scripture, having our neighbors into our homes, and serving in our communities. This "way of life" served to draw us even closer together than we had ever been, and closer to God as well.

    And then, just a few months ago, as my wife and I were feeling as good about Immanuel as we had ever felt, we came to realize that our 6 year old son was missing out on an essential element of community; that of having peers. Of the folks who had gathered with Immanuel, there was no one, other than ourselves, with children over the age of 3. It was a problem we brought to our community in the hopes of discovering a solution. After months of praying and thinking and talking and listening, we discerned that the solution was to disband Immanuel and to find our way into other Austin churches. It was one of the roughest nights in the short history of Immanuel and, for all the crying I did over it, it will certainly not be the last crying that I do.

    They say that over 80% of church plants fail, but the question they don't ask is; fail to do what? In our 5 years serving as pastors of the Immanuel Austin community we have witnessed relationships healed, tragic mistakes atoned for, sins confessed, and forgiveness offered. We have seen love shared with those most in need and given to those who seemed least deserving of love. We've helped people to grow in faith and experience church less as a series of events and more as a way of life. We have watched as folks on the fringes of faithfulness have changed into true followers of Christ, committed to the kind of life that calls for risk and sacrifice and ultimately brings hope and joy. We can testify to the sorts of slow everyday transformations that are nothing short of miraculous.

    A high percentage of churches fail; fail to challenge believers to become disciples, fail to offer hospitality to those that are different, fail to offer grace to those on the outside, fail to offer love to those most in need. The Immanuel Austin community is not a church that failed to do these things. We didn't do them perfectly, but we learned to do them well. I am proud of our church and proud to have served as its pastor. The people of Immanuel have helped to restore my faith in what church can be and I thank God for that. My prayer is that we will each take with us this vision of church that seeks simply to walk in the way of Jesus and to support one another in the effort. My hope is that we, "being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ."

An Unnatural Extreme

On September 11, 2001, I was working as a New Testament teacher at a private Christian school. Less in an attempt to preach and more in an attempt to keep my head and speak against my own anger and confusion, I read these words of Jesus to my 11th graders:


"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven."


Within a few days, an angry parent had cornered me and said, "You are teaching our kids to love to an unnatural extreme."


I empathize with her anger. I do now and I did at the time. My reading was an attempt to let God's truth speak into my own head and heart as much as it was for my students. Furthermore, she may be the first person I ever met who understood the scandal that is the gospel. Love to an unnatural extreme.


God, I hope so. Wouldn't that be something to see?

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
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-mâché,
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 will 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.

-John Updike

Running On Empty

One of the things I give up every year for Lent is pop (many of you know this as soda or "Coke"). There are various reasons I do this, the two main ones being that it's difficult to do and that it's something I have too much of.

But I've been thinking about how pop also serves as the perfect metaphor for Lent as well. Pop is marketed to those who are thirsty and yet its ingredients insure that those who drink it will only be thirstier. It promises to fill you up, but is full of nothing that actually satisfies. It's like drinking a bottle full of empty, but still feeling full.

And that's what the season of Lent asks us to stop doing. We aren't meant to arbitrarily eliminate something from our schedules or diets, but to purposefully have less of something that is making us feel full while simultaneously making us more empty. It may be shopping, it may be food, it may be facebook, but we all have something empty that we're getting too much of. And that's what Lent is meant to help us have less of.

But the point of Lent isn't simply to have less of a bad thing, but more of a good thing; and that good thing is God. God whose fullness actually fills us and doesn't simply make us feel full. God whose fullness may begin with emptiness, but only as a way to cleanse and to make room.

The fact is that we all take in something that is fairly shallow or even empty. We give those things up for Lent in order to have less of them and more of God. The idea(l) is for the principles of Lent to carry over into life. Because, while it's true that a Coke a week won't hurt you, a lifetime of filling up on emptiness will destroy you completely.

Blessed Are The Losers

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, 
   for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 
Blessed are those who mourn, 
   for they will be comforted. 
Blessed are the meek, 
   for they will inherit the earth. 
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, 
   for they will be filled. 
Blessed are the merciful, 
   for they will be shown mercy. 
Blessed are the pure in heart, 
   for they will see God. 
Blessed are the peacemakers, 
   for they will be called children of God. 
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, 
   for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

“Regardess of how you feel inside, always try to look like a winner.” –Arthur Ashe

“If you want to be a winner, hang around with winners.” –Christopher Furman

General Patton once famously stated that “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser,” and you don’t have to look around long to see how often that’s true. We value power, popularity, and prosperity; we have entire sections in our bookstores dedicated to being a success and to learning how to win. Not only that, but we avoid those choices that might lead to having less, that might seem like a step down and can even avoid those people who might not look good or might not make us look good. We want to be loved; and Americans love a winner. And so we will do almost anything to win.

Now Jesus comes with a grace bound up only in his great love and our great need. He does not save us because we are worth saving and he is certainly not impressed with our money, our status, or what we will do to win. In fact, he often spoke against those things.

When Jesus walked the earth; he was known as one who hung out with tax collectors and sinners. In other words, he hung out with losers. In fact, so much of what those who rejected him rejected about him was how taken he was with "the least of these" and how unconcerned he was with winning. He was a loser. And that's why they killed him.

But it’s been over 2000 years since Jesus walked the earth and, in that time, we have created a gospel that celebrates the winner. The most blatant version draws direct connections between being rich and powerful and receiving God’s favor and has become known as the prosperity gospel, but even more subtle forms still hold up worldly “success.” How many of us have attended churches whose eldership was primarily doctors and lawyers? Now, how many of us have attended churches whose eldership included a janitor?

Jesus begins his sermon on the mount blessing the poor in spirit, the meek, and the merciful. But our world (including many of us who claim Christ) see this as weak and lame.

We spend our lives trying to impress, trying to please, and even trying to become the very opposite of the people Jesus blesses. Because the meek and the peacemakers and those who mourn still look more like losers than winners. And we are people who will do almost anything to not be a loser.

Richard Nixon once stated that “the game of life is to come up a winner, to be a success, to achieve what we set out to do.” He was one who once tried to gain the world and risked losing the one thing we’re called not to lose; his soul.

Christ comes calling us to repentance. To go a different way. To make a different choice. To worry less about success and about winning.

Christ calls the church to be a place where weakness is welcome and losers feel at home; where you can walk in the door even if you don't have a savings account or a job or a home.

A place where the poor in spirit are blessed, where those who mourn are comforted and where peacemaking is practiced and celebrated.

A place where purity of heart and hunger for righteousness are valued over talent and ability.

Let’s stop placing such a high value on who has the nicest house or the coolest clothes or the most impressive resume, on who has the best education or who has the most influence or who shows the most strength.


God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: "Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord."

The Last Ten Years

So, it's January 1, 2001 and the millennium has officially begun (that 2000 thing was a hoax folks, nothing's ever 0 years old). I am 24 years old, 2 1/2 years married, and on the verge of moving to Austin, TX for the first time. My wife, Rachel, is finishing up graduate school in Abilene, TX and I am finishing up 2 years of (sometimes very) odd jobs worked in order to put her through graduate school. We're both past tired of west Texas, have finished up what will turn out to be the most difficult year of our married life (in terms of the actual "being married" part) and are ready for whatever is next.

What's next is speech pathology in a private practice and discovering that this career thing comes with a steep learning curve. What's next is teaching American History/Government and Bible at a private Christian school the year of September 11, 2001. What's next is two unfulfilling jobs (one more than another); one quit and one endured and a desire to stay in Austin, but an even greater desire to find meaningful work.

What's next is a move to Durham, NC in search of that meaningful work and both finding it and then one losing it and then being generally miserable when it comes to some of the things that matter most like faith and God and church except when being the opposite of miserable when it comes to some of the other things that matter most like growing together as partners and friends and becoming parents to an amazing son.

What's next is deciding together that something's got to change and that God meant there to be more to life than safety and security and what's next is a leap into something new and moving back to Austin with a 6 month old kid and no jobs and back in with the folks at the age of 29. What's next is church-planting and working in a bookstore and finding that a minimum/hourly wage is better than salary and a savings account when the work is worth it and you're doing what you're supposed to be doing and what's next is learning new things and taking greater risks and highs and lows and ups and downs and joy and struggle and stuff you wish you'd have done differently and things you shouldn't have said and 10 year anniversaries and starting kindergarten and let's try to have another only to find out we can't and maybe we adopt only we can't seem to afford it and it turns out we're pregnant only weeks later we miscarry and we never thought we'd recover only it turns out we will and pain is part of life and with friends and family and faith and God we find we're more than making it.

And it's January 1, 2011 and I don't know what's next, but I'm excited to see.

Any Street, U.S.A.

"Main Street Bethlehem. Don't miss it."

This was the advice given to me last week. The Main Street Bethlehem being referenced is a sort of attraction and a sort of play that is put on by residents of Burnet, TX. The idea is to recreate the streets of Bethlehem, circa the time that B.C. switched to A.D. I've never been to Main Street Bethlehem, but the website description sounds like a holiday experience the whole family can enjoy and I'm not hear to knock it.

But it did get me thinking. One of the biggest temptations for Christians at Christmas is to romanticize and dress up an event that was all to real and messy. We have nativities that feature the cleanest of stables, the most sanitized of animals, and the quietest of babies. I don't know if that's the Main Street Bethlehem approach, but I do know they feature free refreshments at the exit. And I'm guessing that the actual Bethlehem does not.

The thing is, the reason why Bethlehem is special is because it's where God first made His home with humanity. It's the place where God put on flesh and dwelt among us. It's where Jesus was born. Born into our mess and our brokenness and darkness. Born to bring some light and to save the world.

Over 2000 years later, the Spirit of God still longs to make His home among us. Jesus Christ looks to be born into our hearts, our lives, and our neighborhoods. God wants to move among people living on Main Street or 6th Street or 12th and Chicon or Oltorf and Lamar. And we can make such theatre of the past that we forget how the reality of the past breaks through into the present; that Jesus who was born in Bethlehem is alive and sends his Spirit today. That the light of Christ continues to break into every neighborhood and onto every street. Not just main street, but your street and my street and up streets and down streets and backstreets that you and I may go to great pains to avoid. The Spirit of God looks to be born into any and every street, the streets we drive on and past everyday and miss along the way. Miss the lost and the lonely and the angry and afraid. Miss the messy and the real.

So, here's my advice this Christmas as you walk down Any Street, U.S.A.

Don't miss it.

Prepare The Way

‎"Advent is the perfect time to clear and prepare the Way. Advent is a winter training camp for those who desire peace. By reflection and prayer, by reading and meditation, we can make our hearts a place where a blessing of peace would desire to abide and where the birth of the Prince of Peace might take place." -Edward Hays

Unprotected Sex

Not to get all TMI on you, but it has been a long time since I've worn a condom. That is, up until a month or so ago. Then I started wearing them again for the first time in years. Every time. No exceptions.

Now, I'm not anti-condom or anti-birth control. That wasn't why I hadn't been wearing them. I had worn them before Harry was born and after he was born, during phases and stages when Rachel wasn't taking birth control pills and we weren't looking to have a kid.

But for the past few years, we'd been hoping to have a second child, so the condoms and pills were out.

Up until a little over a month ago.

And I realized this week that it wasn't because I've rethought wanting to have another kid. I want that as much as I did a year ago. I want it as much as I did a couple of months back, when Rachel told me she was pregnant.

But then Rachel and I went through a miscarriage. And I started using condoms.

The last few weeks of daily prayer have been revealing something to me. The time spent in our church's study of the Old Testament has reminded me that we are called to live fearlessly. And the wise words and listening ear of a close friend have helped me to realize that I'm not trying to avoid another pregnancy.

I'm trying to avoid another miscarriage.

I'm wanting a guarantee when I know that isn't how this works. I'm looking to avoid pain, even if it means missing out on something great. I'm letting fear get the best of me. I'm trying to protect myself from a bad thing that may never happen and risk missing out on a good thing that might.

And that's not how I'm called to live. It's not how I want to live. And, as a Christian, it's not how I choose to live.

So, as of today, the condoms go back in the box and I go back to unprotected sex. My wife, always more faithful and fearless than I, will be pleased.

And maybe nothing happens. And maybe we get pregnant. And maybe we miscarry again. And maybe we don't. The future is uncertain. And that scares me. But we were not made to live in fear, but in hope; by the power of the Spirit of God whose love casts out fear.

Here we go.

Prayer and Politics

Standout moment at minute 26: "I'm quickly coming to the position that politicians can't really be Christians."

Regardless

I recommend that all of you read this article. The two standouts, for me:


Regardless of one's view about sexual ethics, family values, or same-sex marriage, I believe that encouraging or contributing to violence against LGBT people, either directly or indirectly, is the true sin against nature and creation.



Regardless of what these groups may believe about sin, they need to speak out against this violence. That, to me, is what it truly means to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself.

Hipster Christian

Recently, Eileen Flynn, religion columnist for the Austin American Statesman, wrote to me to get feedback about Brett McCracken's recent book, Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide. She couldn't have used my entire response, but encouraged me to write it down somewhere. Here is that response:

By strange coincidence, I just picked up Hipster Christianity this week, though I haven't had the chance to dip into it much. However, I share McCracken's concerns, to be sure. If there's one way we've put our own spin on the boomer Christian legacy of marrying Christianity to power, it is in our marrying Christianity to "cool". While sincere Christians from my parents' generation (this does not, by the way, include my specific parents and they are not the only exceptions) can object to the loss of public prayer in schools or the legalization of gay marriage; I sense that what is often behind these objections is a desire not to be left out of the mainstream. If gay marriage is legalized, the church that objects to it is suddenly on the outskirts again. If public prayer isn't standard practice in public schools, then we start to feel like we're on the fringe. Folks from my generation scoff at their parents' stance on some of these issues and yet long to sit at "the cool kids table" as much as their parents long to sit in positions of power. We speak as if we're pursuing an edgier, weirder kind of Christianity, but it is too often a new spin on a worn out record. That isn't to say that much of what is transpiring in younger churches isn't a good thing. The call to marry the gospel to social justice is right and good. We've been too long concerned with what will happen if we die tonight, but not what happens if we live tomorrow. We're seeing a renewed vigor to effect the here and now as well as the hereafter, and I praise God for it. But we are also a generation that embraces what is ironic and "hip" to our detriment. We squirm in the face of earnestness and sincerity, when these are both qualities that faith requires. We celebrate Leslie as an iconic Austinite, but still ignore the awkward kid with the out of date clothes. 

Part of the problem is that we saw some sacred cows that needed skewering and enjoyed it so much, we skewered anything sacred. Now we take pride in the idea that nothing offends us, that we don't have the religious hang ups our parents did and, most importantly, that we aren't any different from "you". And that's the truly frightening thing behind the power play and the commitment to cool; we want to make a difference, but not at the risk of being different. We don't want to be "set apart", we don't want to be God's "peculiar people". 

My sister Bri used to joke that Austin's motto should be "Keep Austin Manageably Quirky", because we aren't ready for the truly weird. A new generation of Christians struggle with that same problem. "Manageably quirky" can be cool, but "weird", almost by definition, is not. The weirdness of Christian faith uses words like purity alongside words like passion, it speaks of fidelity alongside faith. It does not self-promote or worry about who's watching. It loves it's neighbor, even if it's neighbor is strange or smelly or simply "uncool". Especially then. It promotes hospitality as well a charity and practices spiritual discipline alongside social justice. It submits itself, humbles itself, and loses itself. It celebrates the meek as well as the merciful, the poor in spirit as well as the peacemaker. The years we spent pursuing power left us unable to embrace that sort of faith. We should be careful not to repeat past mistakes on a quest for what's cool.

I'm reminded of something one of my favorite authors, David Foster Wallace, wrote before he died: 

The next..."rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.

And now one final thought. The apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Philippians: "...whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely - if anything is excellent or praiseworthy - think about such things." But we don't use words like "true" and "noble" and "right" and "lovely" anymore. They're too candid, too devout, too heartfelt, too plain. They aren't cool. We need to rediscover these words and the character that comes with them. We need to remember a savior about whom scripture says, "He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not." We need to model ourselves on a man who was most certainly relevant, but almost certainly not cool.

What It Means To Be "Chosen"

Christ didn’t come to create a closed up and closed off "chosen people", he came that any might be chosen who are willing to choose; choose to take up their cross, to die to themselves, and to live in trust and obedience to God. He came to adopt us all, to save us all, to make us all his brothers and sisters. Whether they be the descendants of Ishmael or Isaac or neither of the two, every person on earth is called to be a child of God. And God’s children do not exist to simply celebrate their status as children or to bask in the glow of the coming reward, but are set apart as a peculiar people to bring good news to the poor and the prisoner, to share light with the lost and the lonely, to walk in a new way and to invite others to walk in it, to hear God’s word and put it into practice, to produce fruit in keeping with repentance. We celebrate God’s grace by sharing it, we celebrate His Kingdom by living in it, we celebrate being children of God by living as children of God. As God sent His Son, He is sending His children, He is calling us, as He did Abraham, to leave our old life behind us and to walk in the way we should go. 

Blue Notebook No. 2

Was recommending Daniil Kharms to a friend today and, as I always am when I recommend a favorite, was reminded of what a brilliant author he was. He wrote children's books, poems, and absurd short (and I do mean short) stories published in underground magazines and banned by Stalin. Here is one example:

    Once there was a redheaded man without eyes and without ears. 
    He had no hair either, so that he was a redhead was just something they said.

He could not speak, for he had no mouth. He had no nose either.

He didn't even have arms or legs. He had no stomach either, and he had no back, and he had no spine, and no intestines of any kind. He didn't have anything at all. So it is hard to understand whom we are really talking about.

So it is probably best not to talk about him any more.

I'll See You In Hell

The following is a speech/sermon given by Hugh Hollowell at the Big Tent Christianity gathering:

According to Jesus, loving your neighbor is half of the greatest commandment. Pretty much everyone agrees that, if taken seriously, it’s a radical idea that could change the world. And yet it seems nearly impossible for American Christians, liberal or conservative, to agree on what it looks like.

Let me make a modest proposal.

Loving your neighbor begins by being in a relationship with your neighbor.

I love Johnny Cash. I have the entire Cash Discography – all the way back to the 1950′s. Love me some Johnny Cash.

Or do I?

Because I also love my wife, and I am here to tell you that while I feel consistently good toward Johnny Cash, how I feel toward my wife depends on what day it is, how our finances are doing, if I have indigestion, whether I had a good day at work… But I always feel ecstatic toward Johnny Cash.

Because I don’t really know Johnny Cash. I love my impression of Johnny Cash. It is fair to say I am a fan, or that I very much like his music, or that I love the idea of Johnny Cash. I submit there can be no love outside of relationship.

By that standard, most Christians don’t really love their neighbor. They love the idea of their neighbor. 


We vote for this candidate or that candidate, whoever promises to provide the sort of help we think people need. We outsource our compassion to the soup kitchens, to the clothing closets, to the homeless shelters. On Thanksgiving day, we load the youth group up in the van, to go feed the “less fortunate”, so the kids can be “exposed” to poverty, while never giving thought to wonder what they do for food the other 364 days of the year. And if that thought come up, we quickly suppress that thought and write a check. We outsource it.

Loving your neighbor presupposes a relationship. It means knowing your neighbor is going through a divorce, that the lady who cleans your office has a mother that is dying, that the man at the end of the street holding a cardboard sign has been outside for three years now, and his name is Brian. In the story we call the Good Samaritan, it meant getting in the ditch to bind the man’s wounds yourself.

When the average person in the pews can tell you the names of all the Judges on American Idol, or can name all the Glee cast members, but does not know a soul that makes 1/4th their income, I think it is fair to say we have lost our sense of mission as co-creators of the Kingdom of God.

Jesus told us the poor would always be with us – but we don’t really want the poor among us – we want someone else to handle that.

Last year in the US, some 17 million kids went to bed hungry. 17 million. In a nation where we throw away 40% of all the food we buy, where 1 in three of us is obese, and yet children are laying in bed, hungry. How can this happen?

Because none of those kids know you.

Because if you knew a kid who was hungry, you would move heaven and hell to get that kid some food.


But because those 17 million kids don’t know you, they laid in bed last night, hungry.

Here in Wake County, the official statistics say there are approximately 1200 homeless people. And many hundreds of Christian congregations. You cannot tell me that out of the many thousands of Christian homes represented by those churches, there are not 1200 empty beds somewhere. Of course there are. But we save those beds for people we actually know.

The justice of Jesus is brought about by sacrifice, love and suffering. And to the extent that we do not exercise sacrificial love, suffering and proclaim the Reign of God, we are far from the way of Jesus.

Jesus calls us to serve, not lead. The way is not about political solutions – in fact, Jesus said political power would be used against us as we sought to bring about God’s justice. The way does not involve courting those in power – the Apostle Paul told us Jesus made a spectacle of the powers of this world.

There are any number of passages in both the Hebrew scriptures as well as the New Testament that speak of God’s love for the victims of injustice and our responsibility to work to bring that justice into fruition. The one I am thinking about right now, however, is Matthew 16:18, where Jesus tells Peter that …”I will build my church, and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it”.

I am not the first person to note that Jesus refers to the gates as a defense measure. Those gates are there to keep us out. Just what does Jesus expect of us?

Jesus expects us to storm down those gates and invade Hell itself. Jesus is telling us to go to Hell to be with the drug addict and the alcoholic. Go to Hell to be with the victims of abuse, and with the abusers. Go to hell and liberate the adulterer, the homeless man, the pornographer. In hell is where we will find the single mother and the embezzler, the pimps and the pimped, the hungry, the broken, the forgotten.


We, you and I together, should be wading into hell itself and proclaiming that there is a new way to live and a new way to love, and that new way is bringing about the justice of God.

The justice of Jesus is a personal justice. It involves sacrificial, relational love. It involves dying to ourselves, our ambitions, our preconceived notions of how things work. The way of Jesus invites us to be the means by which God’s justice comes into being. It invites us to go to Hell, for the sake of those imprisoned there.

Today, in this Big Tent, my most fervent prayer for the church is simply this: I pray I will see you in hell. They need us there.

The Day Everything Changed

“American imperialism, often celebrated as the new globalism, is a frightening power. It is frightening not only because of the harm such power inflicts on the innocent, but because it is difficult to imagine alternatives. Pacifists are often challenged after an event like September 11 with the question, ‘Well, what alternative do you have to bombing Afghanistan?’ Such a question assumes that pacifists must have an alternative foreign policy. My response is I do not have a foreign policy. I have something much better - a church constituted by people who would rather die than kill.

“Indeed I fear that absent a countercommunity to challenge America, bin Laden has given Americans what they so desperately needed - a war without end. America is a country that lives off the moral capital of our wars. War names the time we send the youth to kill and die (maybe) in an effort to assure ourselves the lives we lead are worthy of such sacrifices. They kill and die to protect our ‘freedom.’ But what can freedom mean if the prime instance of the exercise of such freedom is to shop? The very fact that we can and do go to war is a moral necessity for a nation of consumers. War makes clear we must believe in something even if we are not sure what that something is, except that it has something to do with the ‘American way of life.’….

“Christians are not called to be heroes or shoppers. We are called to be holy. We do not think holiness is an individual achievement, but rather a set of practices to sustain a people who refuse to have their lives determined by the fear and denial of death. We believe by so living we offer our non-Christian brothers and sisters an alternative to all politics based on the denial of death. Christians are acutely aware that we are seldom faithful to the gifts God has given us, but we hope the confession of our sins is a sign of hope in a world without hope. This means pacifists do have a response to September 11, 2001. Our response is to continue living in a manner that witnesses to our belief that the world was not changed on September 11, 2001. The world was changed during the celebration of Passover in A.D. 33.”

Stanley Hauerwas, “September 11, 2001: A Pacifist Response”, in Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchis (eds.), Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11 (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 186, 188.

The Good News of the Great Flood

My preaching professor in college once said that your job is to find the gospel in any passage you preach on. This week I preach on the flood and Noah and while you can see good news in Noah's salvation, most sermons seem to pass over the mass drowning of the rest of humanity. It can be difficult to see the good news in Noah.

I think we have to come at this story from an angle that we try to avoid. We like to think of ourselves as good people and God as an easy-going god. This story tells us “how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time” and God as having “regretted that He had made human beings.” I think we conjure up images of humanity before the flood as unruly kids throwing the ultimate keg party/orgy. We see it as rowdy and out of hand, not as deserving destruction.

But I what if we think about a world in which every human being is evil. Think of the things we would do to one another. Think about the things we do to each other today and then take the worst of it and make it a constant. Think about the murder and rape and abuse. Verse 11 of Genesis 6 describes the earth as “full of violence”. Think of a world with so much violence that there was no room for anything else. Ask yourself if God’s mercy could allow that to go on.

I wrestled with this story a lot this week. Because I kept seeing this as a story of God’s justice, and it seemed like a horrible justice. But I have come to see it as a story of God’s mercy, even if it is a severe mercy. A mercy that won’t allow human beings to continue to do such violence and evil to one another. A mercy that steps in and makes it stop.

But then the mercy of God goes a step further. God makes a way to carry on. When He could just end humanity as a failed experiment, He chooses Noah and his family and animals and an ark, and He keeps things going.

Sit with that for a second. God would not only have been justified in wiping them all out, He’d have been merciful in doing so. Instead, He refuses to give up on them at their worst. His mercy cannot allow human beings to continue along the path they are on, but it can allow them to continue along a different path.

So, what does this story tell us about God and His relationship to us?

First, it states that the violence we do to one another will not be allowed to go on indefinitely. And, I don’t know about you, but I see that as a good thing. I want war to end, even if it means that the parts of me that make war inevitable have to be destroyed. And God plans to do just that. He plans to destroy me.

Which leads us to the second part, how God provides a way out. And that is in the person of Jesus and the Way of Jesus. It is in the Kingdom coming and world made new. In Christ, there is a new creation.

In Jesus, God makes a way to carry on. He could have looked at those He had called as His people and simply given up on them. Instead, He makes a way where there seems to be no way. His mercy cannot allow them to continue along the way they are going, but it can allow them to continue along a different way. And Jesus is that way.

So, the cross isn’t about God’s demanding that we kill His Son so that His wrath can be satisfied, it is a story of God who would send His Son, knowing that we would kill him…because that’s the kind of people we are, full of evil and of violence. “But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

But even that is not the end, it’s the beginning. Christ’s resurrection means that we can be made new, our story can continue if we are willing to die, to have our old selves drowned in the water of baptism in order that we might be raised to new life in the way of Jesus. For our baptism is not just of water, but of the Spirit. We can carry on only if we will allow the Spirit’s fire to refine us, to make us into someone new. It will be a painful process. Sometimes it will be difficult to see God’s mercy in it. But it is His mercy that cannot allow us to be who we were and to behave as we did, It is His mercy that destroys our old selves and refines our new selves into the image of Jesus.

We use the language of death all the time in baptism, but how seriously do we mean it? Are we willing to die in order to be made new? Are we willing to see our old selves, our old desires, our old priorities, our old sickness and sin, our old ways put to death in order that we might have new life and walk in a new way? Would we rather be dead than live in a world that Jesus isn't Lord of?

That is what Christ demands, but it is a merciful demand. He seeks to destroy us so that he can start again, making us into the people that we were always meant to be.

Thoughts On Eternal Life

So, I'm no expert on what exactly happens after we die, and none of us really knows for sure all the ins and outs, but I do believe we're given hints and clues and outright statements and I believe that what Jesus promises is a physical resurrection in order that we might live forever under his reign as King.

Assuming that's so, isn't it possible, even probable, that what eternal life is is simply that, we live eternally? What I mean is that we're not (as we often seem to believe) going to suddenly be some other heart, soul, and mind, but will continue to become the people we are as the heart, soul, mind, and body that feel and think and do the things that our hearts, souls, minds, and bodies do. What I mean is that we keep being who we are, but for eternity. And that the eternal aspect simply means that we continue to become the people that we are already on our way to becoming.

If that were so, then we get free of the disconnect of not following Jesus now and being the kind of people who somehow will later. We stop thinking we can be people who fight in wars now, but will suddenly beat swords into plough shares in an instant. We stop thinking that we can feel one way about money and power now, but will abruptly feel another way about it when Jesus returns. Eternity becomes an opportunity to become someone who is following Jesus or someone who isn't. To turn into the person we are currently becoming.

Your eternal life would then be shaped by who it is that you become and that, in turn, is shaped by who it is you choose to follow. Those who walk in the way of Jesus; a way of love of God and neighbor, of justice and mercy and humility, of worship and service, of trust and obedience, find themselves and the world around them getting better every day. Those who choose to walk in their own way, find themselves and the world around them getting worse.

And maybe that's what we mean when we talk about heaven and hell. Maybe we've seen glimpses of them already. Maybe eternity has already started. Maybe we're already on our way to wherever it is we're headed. And maybe it isn't too late to change direction and walk in a different way. And maybe that's what Jesus came to show us how to do.

Hope Makes Plans

Today we turned our calendar to October to write in an event and saw that Rachel had previously written "should be able to feel the baby move."


I know that Romans 5 says different, but sometimes hope disappoints us.


Today is going to be a rough day.