A few years back I had someone give me a word of prophecy. For those unfamiliar that’s when someone tells you something that they believe God has told them about your life.
It sounds pretty weird, and it is, but not scary weird.
Anyway, I don’t remember the exact words but the image was that I was walking through a dark and tangled woods, with thorns and brambles, but that God wanted to promise that I would walk out into a green and clear and warm field. I was confused and wrecked at the time so it was an encouraging word.
As I was driving on the long highway back home that night, I was thinking about that word and the thought crossed my mind, as it has since, that the field could be death. Maybe life is just brambles and thorns and dark and confusion and then I come out when I die.
It’s hard to remember when we’re lonely, and the job hasn’t turned out how we wanted, and hope that life is going turn out how we planned is running short that God is good to us now. Not just in the past and not just in the undefined future, but now. God is good to us and for us now.
Part of the reason I don’t remember that is I don’t do a good enough job of celebrating how God is being good to me. How everything I have comes from him.
So yesterday, by providence or happy accident, depending on your theological inclinations (I’m leaning toward providence on this one) we had cupcakes at church today and I led us in cupcake communion. Because while it is good to take bread and wine and remember the broken body and spilled blood of Jesus on our behalf, it is also good to taste and see that the Lord is good, even when we see dark and thorns and tangles.
Billy Graham turns 90 today. I’ve always been impressed by him. In an era when any well known preacher was a punch line, Billy Graham was the exception to the rule.
What has impressed me most about Graham is his obedience. His call was simple. To share the gospel with as many people as he possibly can. The outworking of that was complex but the original call was so simple. It’s interesting that when his few mistakes did come (his preoccupation with politics, the Richard Nixon stuff) they came when he deviated from that simple course.
For all the debate over the effectiveness of the Crusade and the long term effects, Billy Graham showed us the power of God working through the dedication of group of people to one simple goal, to share the simple message that God came to Earth. That Jesus came and lived, died, and was resurrected for us and through his life we can have life and freedom, and we can’t gauge the impact these people had.
This is a video of Graham doing some of his best work, and the clarity with which he speaks is something I need to emulate.
I realize it’s been awhile, but life has been happening, so… whatever, you get what you pay for.
Anyway, Margaret Atwood is one of Canada’s greatest living writers and more than a few would say she’s one of the best on the planet. Her latest book, Payback is a non-fiction exploration of the concept of debt in our society from a sociological and literary perspective. I haven’t read the book yet, but I’ve read an excerpt and I’m persuaded to buy it. The book it also the subject for the Massey Lectures and I will be listening to Ms. Atwood on Ideas on CBC Radio (Sirius Satellite 137) from Nov. 10 – 14.
One of the ideas she explores is that of the connection with debt and sin. ““The whole theology of Christianity rests on the notion of spiritual debts and what must be done to repay them.” she says at one point. I don’t know if thats the whole theology of Christianity, but it’s certainly part of the picture. This language is in some translations of the Lord’s prayer “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” In this picture Jesus pays back in his death on the cross the debt we have accrued against God with our disobedience.
This has become an unpopular view in some circles and the debate over substitutionary atonement in this sense has burned up many blogs and has pushed people into deep corners of debate. I’m curious if some of the unconscious motivations behind the the denial of debts owed to God might be the accumulations of consumer debt and the desire to ignore it. Perhaps debt language hits too close to home and we’d rather it go away.
I’ve decided to start a series of blessings here. You can read the first one here. So much of what we read on blogs is angry and complaining about stuff, and that’s fine, the medium lends itself to that. But ranting tends to not be a healthy activity for me. I end in cycles of complaint where I develop increasingly more eloquent ways to curse things that piss me off without actually moving past my anger. Welcome to Bitterness, population: Dan. So instead I’m going to bless various things that I have been blessed by as I become aware of them. In case you’re wondering, I did steal this idea from someone else.
So, Coldplay. Apparently it’s not cool to like Coldplay anymore. I was a late coming to them as Yellow was a slower time catching on to me, but I did catch on to Parachutes and by the time A Rush of Blood to the Head came out I was sold. I like piano and I like melody, so it was sort of inevitable that I would like Coldplay. There is something else though. Chris Martin and I are roughly the same age, and we got married around the same time, and our daughters are similar ages, and our sons are similar ages as well, and while were not facebook friends or anything, I kind of feel like we’re traveling companions. While it’s not very explicit (thank goodness) the life circumstances influence the art. They have to. So I feel like the music of his band provides a soundtrack that helps me make sense of my own life.
I remember hearing Stuart Mclean talk once about how he wished that John Lennon had been around for him to grow old with. He wanted to hear what songs John Lennon would write about about middle age and life transitions and empty nesting and all of that stuff. I know how he feels. There are certain artists (Coldplay, Rufus Wainwright, Donald Miller maybe, ) that I feel privileged to share the planet with, and I hope they remain vital and writing songs and books for a long time.
So thank you Chris Martin and Coldplay, for giving me music to rock out to, to unwind with, words to sing to my daughter. Besides legally purchasing your albums, I give you this blessing
” ‘ “The LORD bless you
and keep you;
the LORD make his face shine upon you
and be gracious to you;
the LORD turn his face toward you
and give you peace.” (Numbers 6)
I had never heard of the pastor from Australia with the unpronounceable last name before his story broke a couple of weeks ago, so I didn’t have an emotional attachment to his apparently popular song. I also don’t want to diminish the damage his sin has done to people who trusted him and the Body of Christ around the world. His lies caused an immense amount of pain to a great number of people and there are no excuses for him and there can be no rush to cheap forgiveness. True forgiveness is rarely fast and it is never cheap. That said, I think his song is more poignant now.
Full disclosure, I generally don’t like the Hillsong-y type songs. I find them kind of… stupid. The lyrics never say very much and what they do say is flat and trite and doesn’t really move me. Whatever, I hope I’m mature enough that I don’t have to like every song we sing in order to sing God’s praises. It’s not about me.
But now the story has broken that the disease that this man is trusting God to heal is not the cancer he is elaborately lying to everyone about, but something else; something deeper, something more sinister, something that endangers not only the body, but could destroy body and soul.
I can’t imagine the depth of fear and dread that would make someone try to pull off a charade like that but I can imagine not wanting to show people what I’m really like. I can imagine wanting people to like me, to think I’m smart, or good or worth something more than what I think I’m worth. And I know that this fear and doubt is real and dangerous and deadly and tougher than I am so I need a cure for that dis-ease. I need a healer who can bring me peace.
Now the song has layers. Now the song speaks of something bigger even than cancer to source of our inner conflicts. We fear, so we lie and we hide. But nothing is impossible for Jesus. Even making of us brave people who are able to love, live, and forgive.
I was having a late night conversation with my wife not too long ago and we were talking about, well… pretty much everything, mostly a project that I’m working on about church.
Some background for our conversation. People leave Church. Not just my church or your church but Church. They do this for a variety of reasons. Some are big and dramatic, some are subtle and draining, some we can call good, bad, whatever the reason, they drop out of community with God’s people. Now, I know many people in this situation and most of them would still call themselves Christians and many of these claim that they would like to be part of a church if it was … something.
The basic plot of the story is this: Person A meets Jesus and becomes involved in Church, there is a period of happiness and contentment, at some point there is a conflict, large or small, where the Church fails to be what “A” expected it to be and they remove themselves.
If this seems like an incomplete story, that’s because it is. I know so many people who have run this far in the story who are still God haunted or church haunted, longing for a community they know intuitively should exist but seems incredibly difficult to locate. I could write more but you’ll have to wait for the book.
I can speak to this story because I lived it. I can tell bad church stories with the best of them and it amazes me everyday that my faith survived where it died in so many of my friends. More amazing to me is that I feel a deep bone call to serve this Bride that has left me scarred. The problem is that I did this young. My conflict and rejection of the church happened early enough that by the time God dragged me to Bible College at 22 I had been angry and fighting for close to a decade and I was tired. I had to figure out a way to live with God’s people or break the other way and, for me, that just wasn’t an option.
So when I hear people talking about leaving church and their anger and ambivalence and how they feel lied to and ripped off, I understand it. I really do, but sometimes it sounds adolescent to me because that’s the time in my life when I was going through this. Most of the time I manage to not be a jerk in this, but I feel myself categorizing people and I don’t want to be that guy. People walk their paths at their own pace in their own time.
So for me, the lesson of the day is patience. Patience for you, patience for me, patience for God who is working in his time to bring about peace for all of us who seek it.
I’ve been published over at wreckedfortheordinary.com. You can check it out, but if you want the version with the word penis in it you’ll have to read it here.
In case you’re wondering it amuses me to write the word penis often enough to get false traffic here. If you googled penis and found me Jesus loves you!
Seriously, he does. I’m not joking about that part.
Anyway, wrecked for the ordinary is pretty cool. Thanks guys.
By now most of you have heard about the murder that took place on a bus between Edmonton and Winnipeg. When things like this happen people sometimes look to me as a pastor to answer questions. Questions like where is God when a psycho stabs a random guy to death on a bus. Questions like that don’t have satisfying answers, or answers that heal. Answers don’t heal anyway.
Here’s what I’ve got.
This world, this planet is sometimes very big and at other times very small. It is a place of amazing beauty and wonders and also great dangers. But this world is never enough. It’s not big enough for our joys, not for our sorrows nor for our anger. When we lose someone, no matter how, we never feel we have had enough time, or enough conversations or space to make all things right. When someone is taken from us, no matter how, there is no amount of vengeance that will satisfy. This world is not enough.
So if this world is not enough, what is? Eternity. This world, this lifespan of however many years we’re granted isn’t enough because we were designed for more, life that goes on eternally. All we are is too much, we don’t fit here.
So we look at and hope in an empty tomb and a better kingdom and we long for the day when, like Sam Gamgee waking up after Mordor, we ask “Is it over? Has every sad thing been made untrue?” any the Answer that heals will speak an overwhelming “Yes”.
