A Few Pastoral Reflections on Newtown

Like many Americans, I wept when I heard the news from yesterday.  Perhaps it’s because I have a kindergartener myself.  Perhaps it’s just the utter disbelief that it happened in an elementary school.  Whatever it was, the news of yesterday’s shooting in Connecticut hit me harder than any story since 9/11.

Now after this tragedy, as is the case after every tragedy, we are once again faced with the question, “Why?”  For those of us who believe in God, we are faced with the even more difficult question, “How could God allow this to happen?”  While I don’t really know the answer to that (and anyone who claims to is lying), I wanted to jot down a few thoughts just in case they might be helpful to someone somewhere asking these same age-old questions.

1.     This school shooting was not God’s will.  Sadly, Christians are coming out of the woodwork to explain how this could be God’s will.  I’ve heard it said, “This is God’s punishment for our nation removing prayer from schools” and other such nonsense.  Plain and simple, this did not come from God.  To think that it did is to turn God into the devil. 

2.     Yesterday’s events can be best understood as an act of human free will.  Perhaps God could have created a world in which free will did not exist, but he judged that human free will and all that comes with it – both good and bad – was preferable to a universe populated by robots.

3.     This shooting is not the end of the story.  As Christians, we must insist that evil does not have the final say.  To paraphrase St. Paul, “We mourn, but not as those who have no hope.”  We do not know what the end of the story will look like exactly, but we do believe that even the worst of evils will pale in comparison to the beauty and goodness that will envelop us.  This is not to downplay what happened and how horrific it was; it is just to insist that what happened yesterday is not the end of the Grand Story.   We believers insist on the truth of Jesus’ words:  “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” (Matthew 5:4)

4.     The victims did nothing wrong to deserve this.  It’s truly remarkable that some Christians today still see tragedies like this as a sort of retributive justice from an angry God.  We heard the same drivel after Katrina.  To those who make such hurtful and misguided claims, I plead, “Please read the book of Job.”  Or perhaps recall the time Jesus said: “What about those twelve people who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them?  Do you think that they were more guilty of wrongdoing than everyone else in Jerusalem?” (Luke 13:4).  The point:  there is no correlation between tragedies and the morality of those who suffer from them.

      5.  If we feel pain over loss, God feels it all the more.  The picture of God in Scripture is the Suffering One.  When we want to see the heart of the divine mystery, we look upon the cross.  Let’s not get this mixed up:  God is not the one inflicting pain; he is the one feeling pain next to us.  Too many Christians get this wrong and make God out to be evil rather than good.

I realize that I’m not saying anything new here.  There’s nothing very profound in what I’ve written.  Yet I feel that people need to hear this simple theology in the midst of tragedy.  As many struggle to make sense of what happened this week, we join them, recognizing that we don’t have all of the answers.  But in the meantime we cling to hope.  If we believe anything as Christians it is this:  God is good, all the time.  All the time, God is good.

Take It Down a Notch

I enjoy politics as much as the next guy.  Probably even more, actually.  After all, I majored in it in college and even hosted Greenville College's very first political talk radio show.  But even I'm starting to get sick of politics these days.  Which is too bad because political dialog can be both informative and (dare I say it) fun.  It's the the people who care more about Kim Kardashian's latest escapades and what tops the weekend box office who scare me.  We live in a culture of superficiality and banality.  Politics, with all of its shortcomings, can offer a reprieve from this shallowness so that as a nation we enter into civic dialog about what matters to us... things like freedom, the common good, transparency in government, and so on.  I'm attracted to politics precisely because it DOES matter -- it matters if our nation adopts the Dream Act or "Obamacare," it matters to the retiree if social security will be solvent, it matters to the unemployed if there will be a social safety net available during the hard times.  These things impact the lives of million.  I mean, think about it.  What's more important:  public policy concerning the ordering of the largest economy in the world or fall fashion?

What happens in Washington matters.  And it is worth thinking about and discussing.  As John Adams once declared, "Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write!"

And yet most political banter these days makes my stomach turn.  Perhaps it's Facebook and Twitter's fault.  Perhaps social media has led us from lengthy, articulate, reasoned discussion into loud, obnoxious sound-bytes of 140 characters or less.  Or perhaps we just live in an age where people demonize those who don't agree with them.  (Although this is nothing new.  Just look at some of the rhetoric and political cartoons from the election of 1800!)

Recently a friend of mine excommunicated me from his Facebook account.  Actually, he's a family member.  Why?  I don't know for sure, but I can hypothesize that the reason is because he disagreed with my positions on important social issues.  I really don't mind if someone disagrees with me.  In fact, I welcome it.  Let's talk.  "Come now, let us reason together." (Isaiah 1:18 taken horribly out of context). But that seems like a tall order these days.  Too tall for some.

I realize that what I'm writing is nothing new.  Bloggers, public speakers, op-ed writers, average citizens are all calling for a more reasonable tone to modern politics.  And rightly so.  Consider last night's presidential debate.  It was a bar fight.  As we watched, my wife turned to me and asked in disbelief, "Can they do that?!?" in reference to the way Obama and Romney were squabbling and talking over one another.  So it is right and fitting that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert hosted a rally for restoring sanity in politics.

To all such efforts I give my hearty support.  But I want to go a step further.  I want to suggest that politics has become an idol.  It has become a god which demands our total allegiance.  This is a vicious, territorial god that demands we demonize the other.  This god demands that we unfriend our own family members on Facebook.  This god sucks the joy out of community and sows division, suspicion, and enmity in its place.

I am a follower of the Jesus Way.  It is the core of who I am.  I believe Jesus is Lord even on the days that it doesn't seem like it.  And I know there are many others who claim the same foundation.  Nothing is a more pungent source for unity than the blood of Christ.  And yet I see the body of Christ being torn apart by the idol of modern politics.  Rather than making our political party subservient to our faith, we have allowed just the opposite to happen.  Judging by the passion of some, it is not unfair to claim that they are a Republican first and a Christian second, or a Democrat first and a Christian second.  That, my friends, is idolatry.

It's okay to like politics.  The way we order our society is important and talking about these things is a far better use of our time than perusing youtube videos.  But we who follow Jesus must never allow our politics to subvert our faith, our community, or our unity.  It's time for the idol of angry politics to be named for what it is:  demonic.  

Can we just decide that we won't play that game?  Can we just commit to remaining loving, joyous, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled as we talk with one another?  Can we keep ever in our minds that the cross matters more than who wins this election?  

Let's take it down a notch... a big notch, okay?

Church Hopping

‘…the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be continually taking its temperature. The more thankfully we daily receive what is given to us, the more assuredly and consistently will community increase and grow from day to day as God pleases.’ - Bonhoeffer

In my many years of attending church, I've never been a church hopper -- not even for a few weeks.  I tend to immediately find a church and stick with it.  So these last three weeks have been very strange for my family as we try to find the right "fit."  But even as I write that, I cringe.  Because the very idea that a church must "fit" me grates against my theology of covenant, loyalty, and fidelity.  In fact, the very notion that we can shop around and hand-pick our own church is so utterly American in its consumerist orientation.  So as I church hop, I hear Dietrich Bonhoeffer whispering in my ear, "God hates this wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who dream of this idealized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, and by themselves. They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge one another and even God accordingly’ (Life Together 36).  

But my consumerist objections immediately spring to mind:

But I need a place with a great children's program.

I want to enjoy the music.

I can't stand bad preaching.

I want, I want, I want.

The problem, of course, with this mindset (and I know it deep down) is that all such thinking leaves myself at the center.  And this is precisely the problem with the American church today.  We pack out large facilities with people whose primary motivation is to get rather than to give.  We want to be fed (and commonly object, assuming that our protest is unassailable, as we repeat the cliche, "But I'm just not getting fed here.")

As a 31-year-old male who enjoys reading trendy modern fiction, knows precisely what drink to order at every Starbucks, and listens to Ray LaMontagne, you'd think I would enjoy attending a church tailor-made for my demographic.  You know the ones:  the churches with the coffee bars, the ripped blue jeans clad guitarist, the powerpoint slides in which no letters are capitalized, and a congregation of my clones (twenty-thirty-somethings, slightly progressive, and incredibly white).  Two of the three churches we have visited in the last three weeks have been of this ilk.  They like to talk about organic gardens and fairly traded coffee (and I'm a sucker for both).

But something is missing.  These young pucks, in their fervor to re-invent church, have jettisoned prosaic practices like "Sunday School" and "Invocations" and "Scripture Readings."  Those aren't hip.  People get bored reading too much of that old book.  We wouldn't want folks to get confused and think we're a bunch of old fuddy-duddies.  

And everything in me screams, "no!"  Make me stand up out of reverence for the gospel!  Present the sacrament to me with rich words dating back to Thomas Cranmer or earlier!  Don't just say to me, "So here it is.  Come and taste some Jesus if you feel like it."  Let me sing out "A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing" rather than "Jesus, you're the best."

One week we walked down the street to a little Baptist church just one block from our house.  The singing was bad.  The congregation was old.  The preacher was solid, but certainly not slick or cute.  In fact, he wore a tie!  He didn't have lots of funny stories, but he told us in plain language about the love of God for all people.  

You could tell it was the kind of church that had seen its heyday about thirty years ago, but the saints were hanging on and staying faithful and giving it their darndest to reach their impoverished community.  The stained glass windows bear the names of former members who have passed on.  But this small, ragtag group hosts a little English training time for Burmeese refugees.  They greet us warmly, invite our girls to their VBS, and send us home with a cheesy little card.

And I loved it!  I looked over at my wife to see tears welling up.  We have found a church -- a flawed, uncool group of misfits who really want to glorify Jesus.  Nothing glitzy, no cutting-edge technology, no postmodern logo promoting the sermon series.  Just Jesus.

Our search has ended.  No more church hopping for us.  We're diving in and committing.  

Ten Must-Read Books

My friend John Hay inspired me to think about the 10 most influential books in my life so far.  He posted his list in a newsletter he sends out so now I've created my own.  I'd be interested to hear from my friends what your top 10 list would look like.  Here is mine:

 

10.  Life of the Beloved - Henri Nouwen.  A book that reminds me of the most basic truth of Christianity:  I am loved.  All of Nouwen’s writings speak to my heart and my head.

 

9.  The Doors of the Sea - David Bentley Hart.  I've wrestled more with what is called "the problem of evil" in my life than any other question.  No other intellectual challenge to theism seems so viscerally powerful to me as this one.  This book made me weep with its poetic beauty and philosophical reflections on the tsunami off the coast of Indonesia in late 2004.

 

8.  Life Together - Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  This is a must read for American Christians who constantly underestimate the communal nature of the Christian faith.  You’ll never see the church the same again.

 

7.  The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux.  This classic of Roman Catholic spirituality won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but reading this book was a mystical encounter with God for me as I entered into the life and struggles of this young saint and committed my own life to being a “little flower” in God’s great garden.

 

6.  Brave New World – Aldous Huxley.  Huxley still needs to be grappled with by people of faith.  His frightening portrayal of where technology and addiction to pleasure is leading humanity remains as pertinent today as when it was written.

 

5.  Surprised by Hope – N. T. Wright.  In this one book, Wright summarized much of my theological education at Asbury for three years.  The book is sweeping in scope as it examines where the church has gone wrong in its mission as a result of drifting from the historic Christian commitment to the doctrine of the resurrection of the body.

 

4.  East of Eden – John Steinbeck.  Aside from being a fantastic novel in its own right, Steinbeck explores rich themes of predestination, free will, sin, freedom, and redemption.  I couldn’t put it down.

 

3.  Exclusion and Embrace – Miroslav Volf.  How do both love and justice work together?  How can forgiveness become a reality in the midst of such massive evils like genocide?  This book does better than any I’ve ever read in calling our world toward reconciliation. 

 

2.  The Politics of Jesus – John Howard Yoder.  A fresh reading of the New Testament which allows the teachings of Jesus to take their proper place in Christian ethics.  This literally re-shaped the way I read the Bible and will continue to do so for years to come.

 

1.  The Great Divorce - C. S. Lewis.  Lewis saved my faith with this book.  I find here the only adequate account of God’s justice and God’s love in complete harmony with one another.  You can skip Rob Bell’s Love Wins and just go straight to this one.  I’ve read The Great Divorce seven times in the last decade and will read it again soon in all likelihood.

The Green-Eyed Monster: A Confession

I did something I should not have done this evening.  I checked out the website of a church that is by all accounts wildly successful.  This wouldn't normally be so bad, but it happens to be a church only four years old that was founded by one of my fellow students as Asbury.  We graduated together.  As a result, I cannot help but begin to compare myself to him.  Comparison always destroys.

My classmate’s church is totally, completely, and entirely cool.  Graphic designers create images in perfect minimalist style tailor-fitted to suit the tastes of people my own age.  He preaches in a t-church and blue jeans while sipping coffee from (where else?) Starbucks.  They meet in a warehouse featuring just the perfect dose of postmodern unfinished decor.  They boast a staff of a dozen or so and regularly host nationally known guest speakers and musicians.  You get the picture.  In short, that church is everything mine is not.  And that pastor is everything I am not.

And the green-eyed monster rears his ugly head once again in my heart.

I just returned from leading yet another administration meeting in which we discussed our very urgent need for $5000 to purchase a new AC unit for our century-old sanctuary.  No idea where that money's gonna come from.  We dealt with issues like how messy the steward's closet is and who's going to clean it up, how we're falling behind each week in our budget, how the student we've invested in down at Oakdale is on the verge of being expelled for good.

Sometimes I want the spotlights, the sexy intro videos, the hip Rob Bell-style glasses, and the vodcasts.  I want people to pay their tithe via PayPal on our sleek website.  But instead I'm frantically trying to find toilet paper for the women's restroom before I can start teaching bible study on Wednesday night. 

I want to do something spectacular, but instead I'm biting my tongue while I listen to yet one more jumbled, rambling, self-centred rant during what is supposed to be prayer request time.

Why can't my world be clean and sexy and cool and relevant?  Why can't my church have a logo that puts us on the same plain as Apple? 

(... hold on a sec... the copy machine just jammed again.  Time for me to fix it with some of my scotch tape magic.)

There now.  Deep down inside I know that all of those questions are rooted in sin, envy, anger, and pride.  I know those are questions I must reject.  The much tougher question -- the one that really keeps me up at night -- is this:  Why is my friend so successful and I'm so terribly unsuccessful?  How has he made an empire for himself in the same time that I've managed to tick off a few old ladies and grow a church from 60 to 70?  Why does God seem to smile on him and enjoy watching me nearly drown day after day?  Is it some sort of divine punishment for my sins? 

I realize even while I write this that what I'm saying isn't very rational.  But it is how I feel.  I feel like an old shoe that's been tossed in the back of the closet.  I'm a cheap, thrift store suit coming apart at the seams hanging next to a brand new Versace. 

I guess it's a good thing Jesus is for losers.

Embrace Irrelevance

GC Chapel Address

February 10, 2012





I live three miles from Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.  And, of course, as many of you will know, this was the location of last Sunday’s Superbowl.  Our city had been preparing for this event for two years with fresh construction projects and attempts to clean up the streets (although thanks to the efforts of many, Indy did not push away the homeless as most host cities do around Superbowl time).  We were eager to put on our best face not only for football stars like Tom Brady and Eli Manning, but also for the other celebrities.  The local new stations reported on Madonna and Kim Kardashian sightings.  I joked with one of my female friends (who happens also to be single) that she needed to find Ryan Gosling.  She smiled sheepishly.  For a few days, the city of Indy drew the attention of the nation as we gathered around our TV sets to pay homage to the true god of our age.  And in the two plus years of our preparations as a city, we operated under the assumption (as all cities do) that bigger is always better.
·         As Americans, we are a people utterly addicted to the grandiose.  That which has sex appeal, that which sparkles and shines, that which is earth-shaking grabs our attention and is plastered in the headlines.  Unfortunately, the church in America has too often been infected by this mentality to its core.  Everyone, it seems, wants to be the next Willow Creek or Mars Hill Bible Church or Saddleback or whatever is in fad at the time.  But today, I want to encourage you to reject the impulse to seek that which is cool.  A fellow graduate of ATS, Rachel Held Evans, recently wrote a post on her blog called “Blessed are the Uncool.”  She wrote it so well that I’d like to read you a part of her entry:

·         People sometimes assume that because I’m a progressive 30-year-old who enjoys Mumford and Sons and has no children, I must want a super-hip church—you know, the kind that’s called “Thrive” or “Be” and which boasts “an awesome worship experience,” a  fair-trade coffee bar, its own iPhone app, and a pastor who looks like a Jonas Brother. While none of these features are inherently wrong, (and can of course be used by good people to do good things), these days I find myself longing for a church with a cool factor of about 0.  That’s right. I want a church that includes fussy kids, old liturgy, bad sound, weird congregants, and…brace yourself…painfully amateur “special music” now and then. Why?Well, for one thing, when the gospel story is accompanied by a fog machine and light show, I always get this creeped-out feeling like someone’s trying to sell me something. It’s as though we’re all compensating for the fact that Christianity’s not good enough to stand on its own so we’re adding snacks. But more importantly, I want to be part of an un-cool church because I want to be part of a community that shares the reputation of Jesus, and like it or not, Jesus’ favorite people in the world were not cool. They were mostly sinners, misfits, outcasts, weirdos, poor people, sick people, and crazy people.

·         Ministry among the urban poor has been infected in just the same way.  We who minister in the inner cities of America are attracted to the magnificent success stories such as the work of Geoffrey Canada in Harlem whose innovative school is transforming the community and lifting hundreds of children out of the cycle of poverty.  Of course, I rejoice in stories like this; they provide hope and inspiration.  But sometimes the question comes up, "But why am I not so successful?  What are they doing that we're not doing?  How can we do something truly great so that 60 Minutes will come and interview us?"

·         But God usually does not choose to work through the grandiose.  In fact, just the opposite.  God more often chooses to work through the slow, the small, the simple, and the subtle.  The kingdom, Jesus says, is like a mustard seed -- a seed which cannot be rushed in its growth.  The growth from seed to magnificent tree with spreading branches does not happen overnight no matter how much we might want it to and no matter how much Miracle Grow we might spray on it.

·         One of the projects we’ve undertaken in the last few years is to create an urban community garden.  I really shouldn’t say “we” because all of the work behind this has been done by my wife Courtney.  We see this simple plot of land which we call the Friendship Community Garden as a very small glimmer of hope, a peek at the kingdom of God in the midst of a world where Cheetos and Pepsi are considered part of the four basic food groups.  But for those of you who are gardeners, you know that there is no such thing as instant results.  You plant, you water, and you water, and you water, and you pull weeds and eventually after months and months you get to pick that ripe tomato or spinach, take it inside, wash it off, and make a salad.  This is a radically different experience than popping a TV dinner in the microwave.

·         I don’t believe it was an accident that when searching for a metaphor to describe the nature of God’s kingdom, Jesus turned to agriculture:  the farmer spreading seeds in different types of soil, weeds mixed in with wheat, and the mustard seed.  The growth of a tree takes incredibly long, especially when we contrast it with the fast pace and instant results our modern world offers to us.  As Gandhi once said, “There is more to life than increasing its speed.”  Our pragmatic, results-oriented culture must heed those prophetic words.

·         Now why am I talking about this when our theme for this semester is “crossing boundaries, overcoming barriers”?  Because the work of overcoming barriers – especially the barriers that divide us from one another, be it ethnicity, socio-economic status, gender, language, religion, sexual orientation, and so on – requires extreme patience.  It is slow going.  As an energetic graduate from seminary four years ago, I wish someone would have told me this:  “The work of crossing boundaries is slow going.  It is a long, gruelling march through deep mud.”

·         Our God wants his followers to learn to embrace the long, hard march that is discipleship.  We run in a marathon, not a sprint.

·         I admit that part of my sense of calling to pastor an inner city church came through moments of inspiration at seeing marvellous, almost cataclysmic inbreakings of the kingdom.  Seeing a movie like "Born into Brothels" which tells the story of how photography was used to rescue children from postitution in the slums of India brought tears to my eyes and made me want to stand up and scream, "Sign me up!  I want to dedicate my life to this work for social justice!"  But, of course, I didn't know that years later when we were starting our own photography class in the inner city at the LYN House the main problems would simply be driving the kids to the program, getting them out of bed in the middle of the afternoon so that they would come, and seeking grants so that we can get enough cameras.  And this is what 99.9% of urban ministry (and probably all ministry) is... it is mundane.  It is unsexy.  It goes unnoticed.  It rarely seems to produce fruit.  For every story of someone radically delivered from drug addiction, there are forty to fifty stories of people who we invest in (sometimes for years) who pick up and leave and decide they really do love Vicodin more than Jesus.  It's the family of five across the street that we spend a year investing in, building up in the faith, training for leadership... all to find out one day that they are moving without notice and barely even bother to say goodbye.  (This perpetual transience and utter lack of geographical stability is a rarely noted problem in urban America.)

·         Today in my final moments of speaking to you I stand here offering an invitation.  As college students, you have your lives ahead of you.  The possibilities for what you choose to do with your lives are limitless.  Sitting in chapel roughly ten years ago, my wife and I heard an elderly couple ask us to consider spending a year in China as English teachers.  Courtney and I were very moved and, as a result, we decided to move to China and live there for one year following Courtney’s graduation.  Today I’m here to plead with you to consider devoting your life (or part of your life) to seeking Jesus among those on the margins.  Now that could take many forms – it could be pastoring and living in the inner city like my family does, but it could also be working with refugees, fighting racist immigration laws like those passed recently in Alabama, volunteering to tutor a child once a week, going down to that prison on the south side of town and hanging out with the inmates, providing legal services to those who cannot afford it, speaking out against the mountain top removal taking place right now in Appalachia, or simply befriending someone who seems to have no friends.

·         Some of you are education majors.  Consider using your skills in under-resourced communities that are desperate to attract good teachers.  Some of you are studying business.  Good!  We need businessmen and women who will prioritize revitalizing poor communities by creating jobs and infusing capital into economic deserts.  I challenge you to think about how you could use business to not only generate a profit, but to provide stable employment for the least of these.  Others of you are becoming scientists, musicians, historians, writers, and doctors.  Will you use the jobs you find to provide yourself with comfort and ease?  Or will you take the risk of following Jesus to his beloved ones on the margins, using your skills to provide hope among those who have no hope?  Will you seek first the kingdom of God and his justice and trust that all of these other silly things like money and clothes and food will be provided to you by the Father who provides for the birds of the air and the flowers of the field?

·         In order to persuade you, I could tell you grand, inspiring stories.  I could pull out from the last four years of my life examples of mountain-top experiences to convince you (at least on an emotional level) to sign-up for radical incarnational ministry among the poor.  But I refuse to do that today because it would be misleading.  Yes, there are mountaintops on occasion, but the valleys are far more familiar.  No, my call today is not for you to do something cool (as cool as liberal urban social justice hippies like Shane Claiborne can be), but a call to do something irrelevant, unattractive, unappealing, and usually unnoticed.  I am calling you to mop floors, to serve cheap meals to ungrateful kids, to scrub toilets, to hug people who haven’t bathed in weeks, to genuinely listen to people who are illiterate or mentally handicapped… get the picture?

·         Personal hero:  Henri Nouwen who gave up a career of teaching at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard in order to live among the mentally and physically handicapped in a community called L’Arche.  Once when wiping up vomit from the floor, Nouwen sensed God speak to him and say, “This is your finest hour in the ministry.”

·         If you do choose to use your abilities to build the kingdom among the marginalized, you are embarking on a long, slow, and oftentimes painful endeavour.  You will not always see the results of your work and, if you do, it will not be instant.  You will question if what you are doing is actually making any difference.  Nevertheless you will know that this work will serve in a miniscule way to further the work of God in the world.

·         Story of Lydah helping me to build a snowman.  “Here go, Daddy.”  That’s all we can offer God (at the most) – a few measly snowflakes in his giant project.  The kingdom of radical inclusion and shalom that God is building doesn’t belong to us; it belongs to him.  And it is coming.  Make no mistake.  You could even devote yourself to thwarting God’s kingdom, but it will come anyway.  The only question that remains is:  Do you want to work to build the kingdom of God as God’s co-laborer or not?

·         I’ve walked on the Great Wall of China.  There’s nothing quite like it.  It stretches 5,500 miles in all.  New York to Los Angeles is roughly 2,800 miles.  It was a project that began around 200 B. C. and construction continued off and on until the Ming Dynasty which ended in the 17th century.  Imagine being a construction worker building that wall and knowing that it was there before you were born, you will work on it our entire life, and it won’t be finished for generations to come.  There must have been a feeling that “I’m part of something much bigger than myself.”  The kingdom of God is the great construction project of human history.  It has been being built for millennia and may continue to be built for millennia to come.  Would you like to invest in the slow, simple, and subtle work of God?  Would you like to give yourself to something bigger than yourself?  There is no greater project on earth than to tear down those boundaries and walls that divide us so that God’s peaceable kingdom will reign on earth as it is in heaven.

What the Monks Taught Me

This weekend I had the honor to be the recipient of Benedictine hospitality.  For 48 hours I stayed in the guest house of the Abbey of Gethsemani in the rolling hills of Eastern Kentucky.  The monks have all taken a vow of silence and they ask their guests to do the same while present.  Even the communal meals are eaten in silence.  I came away from this experience with a deep appreciation for the rich varieties of the Christians faith and having drawn close to God in a new way.  While at the Abbey, I took the time to write down some of these insights and thought I would share them with you for your own edification.

Reflections from Gethsemani:

1.  Monks see their silent, prayerful work as missional.  This may strike some as rather odd since they are literally cloistered off from the rest of the world.  Indeed, I've heard many evangelicals criticize the monastic life because it seems too self-focused and neglects the duty of all Christians to "Go, therefore, into all the world..."  So it was quite eye-opening for me when I heard a monk claim that their work is not for themselves, but for the sake of the world.  How so?  Through prayer.  If we truly do believe that prayer changes the world and that God literally acts in the world in response to human prayer, then we must conclude that the prayerful life of this abbey is missional.  Thomas Merton, the most famous of the monks of Gethsemani, once compared the work of monks to trees.  Trees just stay put and remain silent, but they give oxygen to the world.  I see the work of monks this way now and it is spectacularly beautiful.

2.  Unsurprisingly, my time here has reminded me that I do not often quiet myself before God.  I am literally addicted to distractions.  The silence can be fearful for a distraction-addict.  Like a cigarette smoker trying to break his habit, I find myself reaching for my iPhone or a book or music or the TV or food in order to take my mind off of the deafening silence around me.  I thought that choosing to remain silent for one weekend would be a piece of cake for me, being the introvert that I am.  But it has been far harder than I expected.  Language can be one more form of distraction.  But when I truly am silent, I begin to hear things that oft go unnoticed:  the crunch of leaves under my feet, the flutter of birds in a bush, the ripple of water in a creek, the silence in which God makes His dwelling.  It is a bit frightening in its own way.  All things that are holy inspire a sense of dread, awe, or even fear.

3.  The monks pray corporately seven times each day (or eight if you count the mass).  Each gathering for prayer lasts almost exactly 30 minutes.  This means that they spend three and a half hours of every single day in communal prayer -- most of it praying the Psalms.  They take no breaks for the weekend, no holidays, no vacations -- ever.  365 days a year the monks join to pray at 3:15 a.m. (Vigil), 5:45 a.m. (Lauds), 7:30 a.m. (Terce), 12:15 p.m. (Sext), 2:15 p.m. (None), 5:30 p.m. (Vespers), and 7:30 p.m. (Compline).  This means that a monk will never get more than six hours of uninterrupted sleep.  They awaken in the middle of the night to pray for the world as it sleeps.  Last night I woke myself up to join them and was deeply moved by their humble prayers uttered in the middle of the deep darkness.  They are praying for me.  They are praying for you.  They are praying for the lost, the orphans, the widows, the sick, the elderly, and the poor.  And they simply do not stop this prayer.  I feel as though I have been given the greatest gift I could be given to have forty men pray for me at in the middle of the night when I cannot sleep and am filled with anxiety, as I rise in the morning to face a new day, as I care for the poor in our food pantry, as I study for my sermon in the middle of the afternoon, as I return home to eat dinner with my family, and as I lead challenging board meetings at First Church in the evening.  Through it all, these forty men dressed in white gather and pray for me and for the world.  Who knows where I would be without their prayers?  Who knows where the world would be?  The two Cistercian monks who came to this part of Kentucky in 1848 arrived on one day and began prayers the very next day.  Every day since 1848 without exception the monks have prayed for the world seven times.  These prayers will continue, according to one monk, "until the end."  They will not cease. 

4.  Protestants don't do a good job of using their bodies in worship.  A simple practice that I have found very helpful during my time here is to regularly bow at different intervals during worship.  This act of bowing felt odd to me at first.  It reminded me of the time I visited a mosque and watched as hundreds of Muslims packed into a small room bowed in unison.  But, not wanting to stand out in the midst of these devout Catholics, I chose to bow with them and I am so glad that I did!  Now it is my favorite act during Vespers, Compline, Vigil, and so on.  It is a way that we all physically communicate that we are not lords, but servants of the One True Lord.  We face the front of the sanctuary and bow because we have a King and this King demands our full allegiance, obedience, and submission.  The monks have taught me that what I do with my body does matter -- it shapes the way I think, what I believe, and the way I behave.  May I never stop bowing regularly to my Master.

5.  For an evangelical like myself, the monastic form of worship strikes me as very formal, rigid, and structured.  I cannot picture a brother or sister in Christ running up and down the aisles here after "getting blessed" or even raising their hands and shouting "Hallelujah!"  And yet there is here a genuine aura of worship albeit rather reserved (critics might say "repressed").  I have found the structure of the liturgy, the formality of dress, the cold stone architecture, and the monotone chants to awaken me to a fresh appreciation of the transcendence of God.  Christianity has always held in tension the transcendence (otherness) and immanence (nearness) of God.  And although I do believe that if I had to choose one over the other I would choose to focus on the mystery of God's immanence, this can easily become unbalanced.  The Roman Catholics have reminded me that God is beyond me, above me, and mysterious -- He transcends me.  I needed this balance.  Too often evangelicals treat God like He is their buddy or pal.  They speak to God like they would a friend down the street.  But when I see God on His throne, I'm not going to say, "What's up, man!?!  Gimme some skin."  Rather, my utterance will echo that of Isaiah: "Woe is me!  I am undone!"  I once had a friend in college who playfully (and perhaps sacrilegiously) changed the words of the popular worship chorus "I Want to Know You."  He would sing, "I want to know you; I want to kiss you; I want to make out with you."  Being college guys we all laughed, but I understood the point he was making:  in our enthusiasm to focus on God's nearness to us, we have lost a sense of awe, reverence, respect, and, yes, fear when we enter God's presence.  The Trappist monks have reminded me of God's transcendence and I am deeply grateful for it.

6.  Structure is our friend.  Living in the inner city, I see a community which is in utter chaos.  There are no routines.  People stay awake all night and sleep all day.  They eat whenever they feel like it and rarely take time to sit down together to share a common meal.  Toddlers fall asleep in front of a TV at 2 am with a bottle of kool-aid in their mouths.  Is it any wonder why people surrender to ghetto nihilism?  I must confess that such chaos has infected my own life at times on the days that I am conformed to my world rather than transformed by the renewing of my mind.  But the monks show me that structure and routine is my friend.  The bell rings as I type this to call the people to prayer once again, just as it has six times before on this day.  This repetition of order is a reflection of creation.  God made the world to operate in cycles -- the sun and the moon alternate places, the moon waxes and wanes, the seasons switch from summer to winter and back again, the breath in my lungs moves in and out, and the monks keep eating at precisely 7:00 a.m., 12:30 p.m., and 6:00 p.m. -- no variance, no exceptions, no snacking!  Just as the ancient Hebrew people recited the liturgy of Genesis 1 in their worship, so the Trappists cycle through the Scriptures -- the whole Bible in three year cycles and the 150 Psalms every two weeks.  Repetitive?  Yes.  But so is the cosmos.  Perhaps we would do ourselves a tremendous favor to embrace these structured cycles in our own lives.

7.  Father Damien invited us to join the monks for prayer during the 3:15 a.m. vigil.  He said, "You may come, but you don't have to.  That is our struggle and our vocation, not yours."  He said it with a genuine smile and with not an ounce of resentment or judgment in his heart.  If only I would bear my own vocational crosses with such grace and humility!  If only I could learn to be awakened at night by the knocks on my door of people asking for food or money with as much grace as Father Damien awakens each night to pray for me!  If only I could be interrupted during my studies with such patience!  If only I could accept verbal abuse and insults without complaint or bitterness!  Thank you, Fr. Damien, for modelling for me a joyful attitude in the midst of vocational struggles.  I am simultaneously convicted and inspired.

The Situation as it Currently Stands...

She came into my office crying.  She had been beaten by her boyfriend the night before and was scared to go back.  After he threatened to kill her and set her friend’s house on fire, she ran away.  Her two-year-old daughter is with him and she wants to get her back, but is afraid of confronting her boyfriend again.  He has hit her before with a baseball bat and last night punched her in the face twice causing her to fall and cut her leg badly.  Now she needs a shelter, but no shelter will take her because she has lice, she is supposed to be on bipolar medication and isn’t taking it (because she cannot afford it since she’s uninsured), and because she has a contagious cold.  Also, she’s heavily addicted to crack.  She’s afraid of reporting her boyfriend for physical abuse because he has custody of her daughter.  If she reports him, he will go to jail for a long time (since he has a warrant out for him as a habitual felon) and the girl will be handed over to the state.  It is after 8 p.m. and the only shelter that will possibly take her tonight is in Martinsville, IN but that is not for certain.  She has no transportation and cannot drive due to a neck injury that happened 12 years ago.  Tonight she stumbled into the church after relapsing with crack yesterday.  She did have a “friend” who had taken her in, but he kept demanding sexual favors in exchange for rent.  She’s tired of that and refuses to go back.  She’s been turning tricks for a long time to fund her drug habit and has had enough.  At 28 years old she has mothered four children currently spread all over the state of Indiana.  She sits now in my office using my phone to talk to one homeless shelter after another while I sit and pray and type this.  How long, Oh Lord?

I've Mellowed

I'm entering my 4th year now as a pastor and have been reflecting on how my time in the ministry has changed me.  I came out of seminary with lots of really strong opinions and impassioned ideals.  I wasn't shy about expressing them.  In fact, I saw it as a sort of prophetic duty to declare loudly what I really believed what was wrong with the world and how it ought to be fixed.  But somewhere along the line I have mellowed.

And I think it is love and concern for others that has done it.  I'm not saying that to pat myself on the back, but I found out very quickly that as a pastor if you want to try to maintain good relationships with a wide variety of very different people, then you simply have to be more mellow about some things.  For example, I have the organizer for the Obama campaign on the near Eastside in my congregation.  I also have folks who are lifelong Republicans and probably would situate themselves in the Tea Party.  Now I have political opinions.  Anyone who knows me knows that.  But I have had to shelve those opinions quite often in order to build relationships with a very wide variety of incredibly different people.

In some ways this annoys me.  I don't want to become a cookie-cutter pastor who always speaks in empty, inoffensive banalities like the words you find on the inside of a Hallmark card.  Changing my speech patterns and modes of self-expression hasn't come easily.  It often makes me feel like I've had to sacrifice a part of who I am.  Before pastoring I'd always been rather extreme and idealistic -- anything but moderate.  I was the one to ask the questions in class that got everyone's blood boiling and I enjoyed it immensely.  (It kept me awake.  There's nothing as terrifying as boredom.)  But now I play a very different role.  My role is that of the unifier, the bridge between radically different groups of people.  I am the friend to them all although they are not always friends with one another.

All in all, I think it's probably good that I've mellowed a bit.  I'm not the one to poke the fire and stir up the flames any longer (or at least not nearly as much as I once was).  But I have come to love people.  I have learned what it is to shepherd a flock.  Educated and uneducated, black and white, rich and poor, friendly and mean, believers and unbelievers, straight and gay, the selfless and the selfish... I've learned to love them all and do my best not to judge them.  And that has made me a better, more mellow person.  Or maybe not better... just different.

There's a fine line between mellowed and jaded.  Perhaps some days I am more jaded.  My ideals have faded like a t-shirt that's been through the wash too many times. I've been confronted with the harsh realities of urban life and ministry.  But this too is probably all part of the journey.  Maybe someday I will once again be a loud-mouthed zealot who polarizes people.  But for now I'm Greg the Compromiser.  And I can live with that.

Laughter Heals

Last night we sat down in a room together as different from one another as possible.  True, we both speak English, but you can hardly call it the same language.  We are about as different as two people can be in America.  I a thirty year-old white male and she a sixty year-old black female.  I grew up in a gentle, loving home with two parents.  She grew up in a broken home where she was regularly beaten with an extension cord.  I was taught to value hard work, study, self-discipline, and inherited the rigors of the Protestant work ethic.  She was born into a culture of oppression which was forced to utilize lying, cheating, and stealing simply to survive.  I prefer quiet, meditative conversations. She prefers loud, demonstrative ones.  I use words she does not understand and she uses words that I do not understand.

When we first met years ago, we were in the "honeymoon" stage.  We enjoyed each other's differences and laughed over them.  We picked on each other in fun ways.  She made fun of how white I am and I laughed at the same thing about myself.  But as time went on and the relationship grew deeper, things got tough.  We couldn't see eye to eye.  She felt disrespected and so did I.  She undoubtedly had memories of white male power from her past crop up to mind which made me take the shape of an enemy in her mind.  My blood boiled at times as I couldn't understand her lack of respect for civility and "the way things are supposed to be."  The honeymoon ended and gave way to tension, hurt, and mistrust.

So we sat down last night in the presence of witnesses to try to work things out.  Much was said.  She spoke loudly.  I spoke softly (most of the time).  Sometimes she deliberately diverted our attention to win the argument while I tried to bring it back into focus.  But in the midst of it all we were able to laugh.  We laughed about how different we are.  We laughed about how silly some matters are that frustrate us.  I laughed when I realized that only in a church -- and an oddball church at that -- would a woman like her and a guy like me sit down to try to forge some sort of peace agreement.  We are night and day, she and I.  We are yin and yang.  But there is something truly beautiful in it too.  Frustrating, yes.  Sometimes so frustrating that I want to call it quits.  But in moments of laughter I realize that we are winning a small battle in a very large war.