Podcast: The Decision

This is the biggest decision you’ll ever make.

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When it all gets real

This morning I had the privilege of being invited into a group that goes to the scene of homicides in Denver to do what is called a Moment of Blessing.  It is a liturgy about reclaiming peace and hope in a place of violence and despair.  If I have ever been at the site of a homicide before I don’t remember it, and today was a powerful experience.  Here is an article about the woman killed at the place we visited today.  I was impacted by a lot of things today, and probably more than I realize right now, but here are a few.

• When you’re confronted with the extreme violence, hatred and evil possible in our world you are confronted with how much you believe the gospel of Jesus Christ.  One part of the liturgy we went through said, “Come, Spirit, to this place.  As we sprinkle this water, come Spirit, and redeem this space and people from the violence and death that has just occurred here.”  Being there confronted me with the question, do I believe that the Spirit can redeem people and places filled with violence and hatred.
• You can’t categorize people as easily as we’d like to.  If you look at the article from the Denver Post you’ll see this young woman was convicted in an arson and was a gang member.  You also read that she was raising her two young sisters and going to school at Metro State.  What you don’t see in the article is the picture of the place she was killed.  It is filled with candles, stuffed animals, and probably a hundred messages of love to her.  We all are a mixture of sin and evil and good and love.  Following Christ is about letting the Spirit transform the evil in us, it is not about being better than anyone else.  We are all like her in some way.  Reading an article in a paper it is easy to stereotype someone–being there made it so much harder.
• One of the guys there this morning spoke for a minute or two and talked about the burden the shooters will now carry.  I wish I had it just as he said it, but he talked about adding this to their list of things that would bring guilt, shame, hiding, and unworthiness before God and others.  This view is not in opposition to justice, but puts flesh to Jesus’ teaching to love our enemies.  The way of Christ is so challenging and praying for people who have just murdered someone must be among the most difficult.
• We all need to engage things that take us out of our routine and comfort-zone.  This was the most spiritually forming thing that’s happened to me in a long time and I think a lot of that was that it stretched and pushed me in ways I haven’t been before.

I’ll end this post with the benediction I was able to read this morning in that place.

Beloved of God, go from this place in love.  Go from this place in peace.  Return no one evil for evil.  Strengthen the faint-hearted.  Support the weak.  Love one another as God loves you.  As this is home to many of us, it is also home to God.  God blesses both this space and us.  Let’s go in peace.

If it ain’t broke, still fix it

The old saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” came up today in regard to something we’re doing in the church and it got me thinking if that’s good advice.  In one sense I can see it–you don’t want to destroy something that’s going okay.  On the other hand, it seems like advice that settles for average in whatever area it’s applied to.  If my marriage is working okay, I’m not going to say, “Oh, it’s just fine as it is, I’ll just leave it alone.”  I want my marriage to be better everyday.  Same with my relationship with God, or with friends, or with the way we do things in the church.  I want us to always be getting better.  This doesn’t mean changing things all the time, but it does mean evaluating things to make sure we are doing our best.  So I say with things that are important, even if they ain’t broke they’re still worth fixing.

Podcast: Motivation

Continuing in a series on the Sermon on the Mount this one explores what’s behind Jesus’ teaching on giving, prayer, and fasting.

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Homecoming

Every time we go on vacation I fall into some bad patterns.  This is especially true when we go back to our hometown and stay with family there.  Any attempt at eating healthy I’m making goes out the window, I don’t get to exercise much, and I seem to go back to acting more like the teenager that lived there than the person I’ve become.  It’s nothing to do with our family.  To be honest, I’m not exactly sure why it happens.  I guess I have to keep working on the self-awareness to figure that one out.  In the past few years, as I’ve come to deeply value an ongoing and deep relationship with God, the worst part of these trips for me has become my propensity to largely disconnect from the Spirit while we are gone.  It’s not intentional, but as I fall back into those old patters it seems I fall back to the way I engaged God in high school too (which is not much).

When we left for vacation on July 4th I vowed that this time would be different.  It wasn’t.  We had a great time but I came back feeling disconnected from God.  The difficulty of this would have been borne of guilt in the past, but now it is much more from disappointment and the heartache of not being close to the Spirit I love so much.  It actually took me until this morning to really deal with the last couple weeks.  I think I wanted to avoid my disappointment in myself.  But this morning as I sat with God it was a different experience than in the past for me.  In those moments of honesty with God what I felt most was mourning for the two weeks I could have been walking with the Spirit and experiencing life from God’s perspective.  Two weeks of being with him that I gave up for old habits.  And it wasn’t because of guilt.  In fact, what I felt most from God was he was glad I was back.  It felt like a homecoming.  I am so thankful that his love is not conditional on my actions.  And I’m glad to be home.

Podcast: Cheeks, Clothes, and Miles

Jesus calls us to pursue justice in a different way than we’re used to.

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From “The Prodigal God” by Tim Keller

“The Bible says that we have been wandering as spiritual exiles ever since [the fall of Adam and Eve].  That is, we have been living in a world that no longer fits our deepest longings.  Though we long for bodies that ‘run and are not weary,’ we have become subject to disease, aging, and death.  Though we need love that lasts, all our relationships are subject to the inevitable entropy of time, and they crumble in our hands.  Even people who stay true to us die and leave us, or we die and leave them.  Though we long to make a difference in the world through our work, we experience endless frustration.  We never fully realize our hopes and dreams.  We may work hard to re-create the home that we have lost, but, says the Bible, it only exists in the presence of the heavenly father from which we have fled.”

Subtle Shift

“After beginning with the Spirit are you now trying to finish by human effort?”  Galatians 3:3

In my first ten months at Mountair I have seen God do some amazing things in and through the people here.  I’ve seen people freed from addictions, come out of the occult, elderly suburban people hugging homeless people, people using their spiritual gifts, a slow re-connection with the surrounding neighborhood, and much more.  And while all of this was happening, a focus in my own life and the life of the church was praying that the Holy Spirit would work through us in mighty ways that were beyond anything we could accomplish in our own efforts.

Today I read the passage I quoted at the top of this post and was convicted.  This summer we are doing all kinds of things at our church and with others in the community for both adults and kids.  It’s only June and I know at least my wife, my administrative assistant, and I feel pretty wiped out.  Without meaning to I set a course for the summer that is much more about our efforts and planning than it is the work of the Holy Spirit.  I say this partly because in setting the course for the summer I relied much more on activity and strategies I’ve read about than prayer and the Spirit’s wisdom.

I’m certainly not saying we shouldn’t do any activities.  But I’d rather do the things I believe the Spirit is leading us to do than the things I think are a good idea (or anyone else for that matter).  When things seemed so daunting at the beginning it was easy to rely on the Spirit–we were doomed without his work.  But as things have gone well it started to feel like we’d make it and we could handle it.  This subtle slip from the Spirit to human effort wasn’t intentional, but I think it is bound to happen without being intentional about continually relying on the Spirit.  My default is to rely on my own effort and the effort of others.  What I need is to stay aligned with the Spirit and help others do the same.

I praise God for his correction, it is needed!

Podcast: Beautiful Commitment

A look at Jesus’ teaching on divorce and adultery.

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Learning…Slowly

At the end of seminary and just after I was on staff with a church just outside Denver.  The reason that matters presently is while I was there an ongoing discussion (tension?) was going on in regard to worship (in this particular post I am using worship to refer to what evangelicals usually mean when they use the word, which is the music/singing that goes on in a Sunday morning service).  Our Senior Pastor, and my mentor, was trying to lead the church in adopting “blended worship” which meant the best from all different eras.  He certainly had a preference for the hymns, but last I checked even pastors are allowed to have preference.

Now, at the time, I was in a camp that was pushing back against this endeavor.  I was the pastor of the young adults and I had to “stand up for them” in this area.  I reasoned we couldn’t continue to reach our culture if we didn’t primarily use music that sounded current to our time, and I was positive that singing songs with antiquated language like thee, thou, or shalt, would cause people under 40 to go into spontaneous convultions.

What I missed at the time, or at least dismissed, was the immense value in the process our Senior Pastor wanted to submit all music to.  I don’t remember all the criteria for songs we used, but I know that being “singable” and theologically sound were two of them.  Now that I have entered a position where I am playing a role in selecting the music I think so much more about these two things, and especially the second one.  I grow weary of singing songs that talk about me and are as deep as something from the Wiggles.  What I’ve learned is that depth of lyrics enables deep worship.

I still have a bit more of a pension to lean toward modern musical styles and lyrics, but I care so much more about the things my pastor and mentor did back then.  I guess I’m learning…slowly.