We’re Great, Try to Relate

A pastor greets a new family to his church and spends the next fifteen minutes extolling the virtues of the congregation and its talented members.  He walks away hardly knowing anything about this new family, not to mention the basics of manners.

A missionary team visits a third-world country with the goal of helping “those poor people.”  At the end of their trip, an indigenous pastor vows to never have these teams come again because of the worldly and materialistic influence they have on his young converts.

Two congregations find themselves subtly competing with each other.  The one church, with a large membership, can out perform, out class, and out spend the smaller congregation on almost every front.  Whenever these two churches meet for fellowship, the members of the smaller church have to endure  long sessions where all the marvelous accomplishments of the larger church are recounted.  The large congregation is glad they have something to offer the smaller, struggling church.

What do the welcoming pastor, affluent missionary team, and large dynamic congregation all have in common?   They believe that ministry means telling others, “We’re great, try to relate.”

Does ministering to others mean showing off?  Christians are called to spread the gospel.  Is the gospel message a declaration that I have something other people don’t?  Sadly, that’s what I used to think and I suspect many others do, too.

Embracing the gospel, rather than making me think that I’m better than others, should subdue my pride and deliver me from attitudes that hinder relationships.  The gospel is all about restoration of relationships (with God and one another).  Why do some Christians turn a relationship restoring message into a competitive opportunity to demonstrate their greatness?  Possibly, because they misunderstand God and His gospel.

The story of the Bible isn’t a story of a conquering God.  It’s the story of a serving and suffering God.  Starting right from Genesis we see the Trinity making space for man, inviting him, accommodating him, and wooing him.  The Prophets paint a picture of a Grieved Lover.  Christ, God incarnate, explicitly says that if you have seen him you have seen the Father.  And what do we see in Christ?  A serving, healing, and suffering Lord.  One who becomes poor so that others may become rich.  The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and give His life a ransom for many (Mark 10:45).  The triumph of God is a triumph of love.  Ministry means transmitting this message.

If we truly want to spread the gospel, we must become poor in order to make others rich.  Bragging about how talented, how smart, how strong, and how morally right we are won’t help anyone and it won’t identify us as children of the servant God.  The goal is the healing of humanity and the restoration of community.  Rather than declaring how wonderful we are in hopes of attracting people to God (or perhaps more truthfully, to us), our cry should be, “You’re great, I want to relate.” Ministry to others means serving them in weakness so that friendship and communion can flourish.

We Are a Temple

“…the living God fills heaven and earth, and yet he chooses to dwell particularly in one place. And that place is no longer a building, in Jerusalem or anywhere else. It is a family, the family of those who belong to the Messiah.” N.T. Wright, After You Believe

“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the corner stone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit.” Eph. 2:19-22

What is astonishing about the Jewish temple in the Old Testament is that it is where the omnipresent God chose to localize Himself in a particular place. The temple was the location where people could concretely find and relate to God. It was the physical setting where they could know His presence and commune with Him. It’s not that He couldn’t be found elsewhere, but it was the primary place to come in contact with Him.

What is perhaps more astonishing is that in the New Testament the church becomes the place where God localizes Himself. Consequently, it’s among God’s people we primarily come in contact with God. The church is God’s temple today. No where in the Bible do we get the modern image of an individual Christian finding God on her own, on a solitary quest to become the person God wants her to be. Niether do we get the idea that the church is simply a place where like-minded believers go to strengthen each other on their own personal Christian journeys. No, the church (and I don’t mean a building) is a sacred place where God dwells and where we come to know Him.

If we see the church (God’s people) as a holy place where the living God is manifest, then maintaining unity and commitment to the family of the Messiah becomes a top priority. Unfortunately, for many, church is a meeting they go to, and an optional one at that.

Raw Notes: My Brother’s Keeper

Lately we’ve been thinking about how to be our brother’s keeper in the best sense of that phrase. Living closely together makes any superficial ideas about our responsibility toward each other seem ridiculous. We know the answers are much deeper and more costly than you might typically hear. We were intrigued by Carolyn Arend’s song, “No Trespassing,” and felt there was a message in there for us.

The following are some “raw notes” of the concepts we teased out about how to be my brother’s keeper. I call them “raw notes” because they are straight from the fire hydrant – not much editing and not intended to be thoroughly polished. We basically saw our calling summed up in three “S”es: Support, Supply, and Signal.

Support
Each person’s journey is hard and uniquely difficult.

1. We listen.
2. We’re friends that cheer each other on (believing in each other).
3. We have empathy for each other (compassionate understanding).

Supply

1. We make our resources available to each other (spiritual, material, financial, intellectual, vocational, and time).
2. Prayer for each other.

Signal

1. We provide guideposts for one another as to what is right and good.
2. We should look to each other to see how to navigate life’s decisions. Life is complex and things don’t reduce to simplistic questions. There’s no rule book we can go to. If others have reservations about a particular activity or action we do, we shouldn’t judge that and blow it off, but consider that God may be supplying us through that.
3. We should be willing to express concerns and we should be willing to receive them. We express concerns unapologetically, but not from a position of omniscience. Some exhortations are more judgment or opinion. Others are specific, concrete warnings that are clear from the scriptures.
4. We receive expressed concerns gratefully, with full trust and understanding that the person isn’t saying they’re better than us or that they know everything.  Basically, take it the same way you would want your expressed concern taken.

Maturity Missteps

I think we often have false concepts about growth and maturity. We think that growth will mean that we’ll be less emotionally upset by negative situations. The farther along the Christian path we are, the less negative emotional energy we’ll experience. We envision maturity to be a state of emotional calm and peace that can’t be easily disturbed. Additionally, the more we grow the less needy we imagine we’ll be. As we navigate life and acquire knowledge and wisdom (including familiarity with scripture) we think we’ll find ourselves in a place of answers rather than questions, and having answers means we won’t be needy. Being needy, after all, is quite distasteful. Most likely these ideas come from the influence of stoicism and probably other philosophies. The Christian idea of growth, however, is very different.

The difficulty in trying to define Christian growth is that these other ideas have a sliver of truth in them. Growth should mean that we become more emotionally stable. We shouldn’t be flying off the handle or given to roller coaster like emotional rides. One of the reasons people have unstable emotional lives is because they lack self-control and understanding. Growth will mean development in both of these areas. But in other ways, growth will actually evoke stronger emotions then one would have otherwise. When understanding is developed, one has the ability to see beyond the superficial, and that means true injustice will be more easily perceived which should elicit strong emotions. Understanding can enable us to have a better picture of the whys behind people’s actions, and if those actions stem from selfish motives we will naturally be more grieved or angry (or both). Growth wakes us up, both to more good than we could see before, and more evil than we could see before.

Likewise, growth and maturity are going to involve gaining experience which should help us navigate the vicissitudes of life with greater skill. But the secret here is that the skill acquired isn’t about how to handle things single-handedly, but how to remain in an interdependent relationship with both God and other believers. Christian growth and maturity means growth as a person, someone who is capable of relationship with others. God is a communion of love (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) and humanity was created to join in that communitarian dance. We are, at the heart of our design, relational beings and we come into our fullness when we can relate well with other people. Christian maturity is relational maturity.

As we grow we roll with the punches better and are able to respond to negativity more beneficially and less vindictively, but it doesn’t mean we have fewer “punches” or disturbances. Our lessons become more profound, but not necessarily less frequent. Maturity means we’re more open, more teachable, more aware, more sensitive to real injustice and less sensitive to personal offense. In short, we’re better persons, more capable of communion, but more vulnerable to the grief that comes from those things that destroy relationships.

The Body – A Metonymy

In N.T. Wright’s new book, After You Believe, he brings out a powerful thought about the metaphor Paul uses for the church – the human body. In 1 Cor. 12 Paul uses the human body to describe the church, “For even as the body is one and yet has many members, and all the members of the body, though they are many, are one body, so also is Christ” (verse 12). What Wright points out, however, is that this is not just a random metaphor Paul is using, but rather it has greater significance than to just illustrait a unity in diversity principle.

The body metaphor is in fact a metonymy, “A figure of speech that consists of the use of the name of one object or concept for that of another.” In other words, the church being represented as a human body points to the reality that God’s people are a symbol of the new humanity, inaugurated in Christ through His life, death, and resurrection. Through Christ, the second Adam, what it is to be human has been redefined. Instead of the individualistic, self-promoting way people have lived on earth since the first Adam’s fall, Christ as the firstborn among many brothers has put humanity back on course and shown us a new way to be human, a way in which love and servanthood are the norm.  The church embodies this new humanity through its life and unity.

This concept is why virtue and unity is not a nice option for the church, but critical to its mission. Without love being lived out practically among God’s people, we miss the entire purpose of the gospel. Community is at the heart of the Christian message.

“There is an appropriateness about this metaphor; or, if you like, this is not only metaphor, but also metonymy. The construction, and proper operation, of a new way of being human is exactly what it’s all about. A human body isn’t just an illustration drawn at random. It is a signpost directly into the heart of what’s going on…The challenge to live as a single body is the challenge to live as the New Human. When the Spirit of Jesus the Messiah comes to dwell in Christians, individually and corporately, this happens so they can be – all together – the place where his genuinely human life actually and physically continues within the life of the present world.”

Community and Virtue

“Since ‘love’ is the primary virtue (Col. 3:14), community is the primary context.” N.T. Wright, After You Believe

Why we live in community

“That which is going to be true in the future…must be anticipated in the present.” N.T. Wright, After You Believe

How to behave?

“…people tend to go in one of two directions when they think of how to behave. You can live by rules, by a sense of duty, by an obligation imposed on you whether you feel like doing it or not. Or you can declare that you are free from all that sort of thing and able to be yourself, to discover your true identity, to go with your heart, to be authentic and spontaneous….What are we here for in the first place? The fundamental answer…is that what we’re ‘here for’ is to become genuine human beings, reflecting the God in whose image we’re made, and doing so in worship on the one hand and in mission, in its full and large sense, on the other; and that we do this not least by ‘following Jesus.’” N.T. Wright, After You Believe

We Continue to Matter

When we keep alive the memory our loved ones who’ve passed away, we’re not just keeping our ability to remember them strong, we actually enable their personhood to have the last say, not nature, not death. Who they are, their personhood, lives on and has significance. Their life continues to matter. That’s what we’ve been learning since Karen’s passing. Karen is still a part of who we are. She matters.

We have our being in communion. In other words, we are not just isolated individuals, we’re shaped and exist in a context of relationships. In fact, our brains actually change physical shape from our interactions with others. People leave their imprint on us, literally. To be a person, is to be in relationship. There is no such thing as a person apart from relationships. We really matter to one another. People in our culture try to live as if this is not true, but that doesn’t change the reality of it. We must treat as sacred our relationships - the living and the dead.

To cherish our relationships, both living and dead, is to say that love has the last word, it’s to say that humanity is far above the animal world, it’s to say there is a God and we are loved. We shouldn’t be afraid to talk about Karen or include her life in our conversations. This is most natural and right because her life is a part of us. People often get funny when talking about the dead, there’s a kind of awkward morbidity. I’m not sure what this is, but as Christians it should be different for us.

This agnostic take on death, so prevalent today, has affected how even Christians conduct funerals. The modern funeral only celebrates the past, and then afterwards the person fades from memory. But as Christians we don’t believe that death has the last word. We don’t believe that the person is extinguished. We miss them and grieve our loss, but our grief is fused with hope and a continued celebration of their life. We know our lives have been, and continue to be, shaped by them.

As Christians, we celebrate the present (that the person is part of who we are now), and we celebrate the future (that we’ll be reunited with them and continue our relationship).  1 Thessalonians 4:13-14 says, “But we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus.”

The Bible uses the word “sleep” to talk about a believer’s death. That’s because death is not a final state – it’s kind of like sleep. The person is there, but they’re not animated in our presence, they’re sleeping. Karen exists, she is not gone, but she is not animated in our presence. The reality of her life is kept alive by our memory of her and including all that she was into our lives. Let us remember her, let us talk about her, let us continue to allow her life to shape us. And one day, we all will awake from a sleep, and the journey we’ve begun here with each other will continue.

“When the eucharistic community keeps alive the memory of our loved ones – living as well as dead – it does not just preserve a psychological recollection; it proceeds to an act of ontology, to the assurance that the person has the final word over nature, in the same way that God the Creator as person and not as nature had the very first word.”  John Zizioulas

Grace Makes Me Reverent and Not Afraid

I had one of those experiences this Easter you get when you buy a new car and then start seeing that same model on the road everywhere, whereas before you never noticed. My daughter was beautifully singing Amazing Grace, while our string orchestra accompanied, and in a flash I started to see the power and meaning of the lyrics like never before. I must have sung or heard Amazing Grace hundreds of times over the course of my life. I’ve enjoyed the lyrics, but they didn’t impact me as profound. That all changed this Easter.

I think I know why this “Amazing Grace” epiphany happened on Sunday. Firstly, my concept of grace has been transformed by understanding the gospel, and indeed life in general, in relational terms. It’s all about relationships and communion. The gospel has too long been seen through a legal paradigm. Justice, righteousness, and salvation have been explained to Christians primarily using legal terms and concepts. The focus has been having a clean moral slate and seeing God mostly as a King who must maintain legal justice. Sin is talked about as missing a mark, a violation of an abstract standard. The Bible’s emphasis is very different. God is portrayed primarily as a Father and righteousness is about wholeness in relationships. Sin is not mainly a violation of a standard, but a violation of relationship. In light of this, grace is more than just “unmerited favor”, although that’s true. Grace describes a disposition of openness, vulnerability, and love. It’s the fuel of intimacy.

It’s unfortunate that grace has had to contend with legal barnacles. Instead of transmitting the warmth of mutual fellowship, its legal baggage has made it seem like grace is all about being pardoned for a crime you’ve committed. While that is a wonderful reality, it’s not likely to produce a lover. The miracle of grace is that God is tenaciously pursuing a warm, intimate, and shared life with us. He isn’t being legal, He is being personal. And this is where the lyrics of Amazing Grace have blown me away.

The verse that caught my attention says, “T’was Grace that taught my heart to fear. And Grace, my fears relieved.” In other words, God’s pursuit of communion, His openness, vulnerability, and love towards me has changed me to become a person who can love back and live a life of wholeness (reverence). “Grace taught my heart to fear” – to be reverent, to regard God and others as precious. I’ve fallen in love with God and man. And part of this is having my disordered, self-focussed fear of loss to be done away with. Knowing this kind of God draws my attention away from my own survival and allows me to live generously – “and grace my fears relieved”.

I can’t believe I missed the meaning of that verse all these years, but I’ll take an epiphany of God’s love even if it means singing a song hundreds of times. I have to also thank our liturgy, reading the Bible as a narrative, and our corporate study of the arts for helping me understand this song. But I’ll have to leave that subject for another post.