Do we "owe" worship to God?

I came across an ancient Persion poem by a poet named Hafiz, written in the 1300s. It made me think of worship.

Even after all this time
the sun never says
to the earth,
"you owe me."
Look what happens
to a love like that,
it lights up the whole
sky.

I've heard some refer to worship as a duty, as something we "owe" to God. But is that what it's all about? Does God have some kind of insecure ego that requires constant stroking to keep him from freaking out? Or does he simply take pleasure in pouring out blessing after blessing on the just and unjust alike?

I think the earth's most basic and appropriate response the the sun's light is acceptance. It is being warmed by the glow.

Perhaps worship is that faint reflective glow that bounces back toward the sun from the surface of the earth. Just like the moon has no light of her own but shines the sun's like back to him, perhaps that's what we do as well.

The prophetic wisdom of Abraham Lincoln

We just inaugurated our new President. And today, just a few weeks later, we celebrate the 200th birthday of perhaps our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln.

In between these two dates, I had the chance to walk part of the Mall in Washington, D.C., and spend some time in the Lincoln Memorial. Along with the huge and stunning sculpture of this gaunt giant of a man are the full texts of two speeches. To his right is the Gettysburg Address. To his left is his Second Inaugural Address. It's the second that sucked me in. I'll quote about half of the short speech here. It was short and to the point, because the nation was still deeply at war with itself. This was not a time for celebration. It was a time for prophetic utterance. And he does speak like a wild-haired Old Testament prophet or a John the Baptizer, straight out of the desert. It's absolutely brilliant in its ability to perceive the truth of a situation, not look down his nose at anyone, and yet see the judgment of God being played out.

Thanks, Abe. I wish there were people who could speak like you did to the life of our nation today.

Here's the quote. He's in the middle of talking about the people of the Northern and Southern states.

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Leadership is a pain!

I am in a meeting with a leadership coach, Kevin Ford, and he's just said something painful: “Leadership is disappointing people at a rate they can tolerate.”

How fun does that sound?

But it's true. Leadership always means leading change. But what Ford was getting at is that people can only tolerate a certain level of change before they start to freak out. So, figuring out how much they can handle and neither pushing them too much or too little.

In other words, it is no fun. People will always be unhappy. Or, as Ford said, disappointed. They will always be uncomfortable, because leaders will always be stirring things up, just when they're starting to get comfortable again. I guess the only comfort in this is knowing that this is what leadership is all about. If people are saying they're disappointed, it means that we're doing our jobs well. So, that's nice to know ....

But it's really helpful for me, since I tend to want to be a peace-maker. I don't like to disappoint people. And if I'm going to lead people in establishing God's kingdom (and not their own), they're going to be disappointed. And that has to be OK, because it means that I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

The question: How do I know that people are being disappointed by the right things or the wrong things?

Yes, but ...

For the past five years, I have been keeping up with my reading on emerging church books and articles and blogs. And I've picked up lots of interesting things:

• A renewed missional emphasis — the church doesn't exist for itself but is an expression of the kingdom of God for which it exists.
• An embrace of postmodern questioning — don't give us a bunch of pre-fab answers, but let us participate in the questioning.
• A desire for embodied worship — don't just engage my mind, engage all of me.
• An embrace of technology not as the key to success and hipness, but as a component of 21st century culture.
• An end to denominational tyranny — the willingness to work and witness and worship across the previously impervious bounds of denominational walls and to side more with Jesus than denominational pronouncements and structures.

But what I can't stand is the arrogance.

There is this whatever-came-before-sucked-and-must-be-ditched attitude.

Some of it is theological as there are those who believe they need to rethink Christianity from the ground up. But I have yet to discover anyone among their ranks on the level of a Karl Barth, much less an Augustine or an Aquinas, a Calvin or a Luther. I don't get a sense of an intellectual depth, a biblical depth, or a prayed depth that matches any of these.

Some of it has to do with Ecclesiology: The church in its current structure is doomed. At first, when I read these authors, I wondered if I should leave my pulpit and return to journalism. Think of how the money used to pay me could be used! Think of how professional clergy cripple the gifts of the rest of the church by doing everything for everyone, or at least pretending to. And the buildings! We seem to worship our buildings more than the Christ we claim to worship. And, again, think of all the money that goes into maintaining them. And the sermons! What a lousy way to learn the Scriptures — all classroom and no homework. Tear it all down and start over again!

There are some valid critiques. We are way too pastor-oriented. We are way too-building oriented. We are way too sermon-oriented (or at least, we claim to be).

Perhaps it is in fact time for something new. But that doesn't mean that we denigrate the way the Spirit has chosen to work over hundreds of years. Yes, things haven't always been this way. But the Spirit has always blown life through our dead structures.

Much needs to change. But let's not cut down the whole tree, OK?

Word-map of the NT

Wordle.net is a fascinating website. You can enter whatever text you want into the text box and it will pull out the main words and make the ones which occur more often larger than the rest, giving you a feel for word usage — and also because it looks cool. Well, someone did a Wordle of the entire New Testament. It's interesting to see which words are highlighted and whose names make the cut.

http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/27349/NT

Divine appointments

I don't like appointments. They're rarely enjoyable. The usually have to do with painful teeth stuff or medical pokings or tense relationships.

But I had one of those encounters today that we call a "divine appointment."

I ran into and ended up having a conversation with someone who left our church about a year ago. There was a little awkwardness there. But there was a brotherliness as well. We were able to talk candidly and I was able to bless him to his new church (even though he kept saying that it was a temporary sojourn and that he'd be back some time).

I wouldn't have chosen the meeting. I don't like digging up things that make me feel awkward. But I guess that's why God takes things out of my hands and makes the appointments himself.

Atonement — Beyond the movie to something real

We watched Atonement last night, a movie version of Ewan McGregor’s book, starring Kiera Knightly. (Spoilers ahead.)

A 13-year-old girl feels rejected by the young man she has a crush on when he saves her from her rehearsed drowning and is angry with her instead of being her hero. So, she chooses to see things in a new light, where he is a sexual predator instead of the loving suitor of her older sister. This interpretation of reality leads her to provide the key witness against him in a rape trial. Ultimately, he dies in France and her sister dies in a war-related accident in London — the two never able to marry or share their love for each other.

The girl grows up to be a respected and successful novelist. Her final novel is a telling of the truth about what she had done. It exonerates the man, taking the blame for what she had done. But it goes further. In the book, she has her sister and her lover reunite, marry, and live a full life of love. What had been stolen is returned.

But is it really? No. It’s too late. There’s no real atonement. Nothing is made right. The dead are not raised. No novel can do that — at least, it can’t do it for the dead. The only one who has any feel of atonement is the girl, now an old and dying woman.

What the story highlights is our inability to atone for our sins.

There are things we simply can’t make right. Atonement is beyond us. We can’t raise the dead and give them the ability to live happily ever after.

Instead, we are left with regrets. And here, this girl throws herself into the thick of World War II as a selfless nurse, trying to win atonement through service. But that doesn’t work. The soldiers keep dying anyway. So, all she’s left with is writing and rewriting her regrets throughout her life, never achieving forgiveness or reconciliation.

None of us can atone for ourselves. There are moments of making things right. But there are so many regrets that we have no opportunity to do anything about.

Atonement has to come from outside of us. We just don’t have what it takes to generate it ourselves.

That is why, as a Christian, I surround myself with the image of the cross. For in his death, Jesus has in fact dealt with all the stuff of the past. And in his resurrection, he has paved the way for something better and more beautiful in the future. Not a future of fiction and what-ifs, but a future guaranteed by the presence of the Holy Spirit this very day, a living hope.

Garfield WITHOUT Garfield

I was pointed to this website recently: http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/?loc=interstitialskip

It's a fairly twisted take on the Garfield comic strip. What's twisted is that when Garfield is removed from the comic, John Arbuckle (his "owner") starts taking on a fairly freaky personality. When Garfield's image and thought bubbles are removed and John is left by himself, he starts seeming desperately lonely as he talks aloud to himself and depressingly hopeless about life.

As I looked through the images, it made me think of the Christian "life" without the presence of the Holy Spirit.

I won’t say that Garfield is the Holy Spirit. Heaven forbid! But those comics don’t make sense without Garfield. They are grim and empty.

Garfield is the spark, the life, the power without which John Arbuckle lives a meaningless, hopeless, purposeless life — a shadow life. But when Garfield is added, John’s life is a wild adventure, never lacking in energy and motion. You never know what’s going to happen. You may not like what goes on all the time, but there’s never a dull moment.

Now, the Holy Spirit is a far cry better than a fat, selfish, lazy, mean-spirited cat. He is the one who causes us to bear the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. He is the one who makes it possible for us to live the Jesus kind of life, the real life that Jesus has opened up for us by saving us from our sins.

Our sins are what we’re saved from. But life in the Spirit is what we’re saved to.

A picture of our torn up praise

I came across a song by the band Phosphorescent called "A Picture of Our Torn Up Praise" and it has intrigued me ever since — not the song, just the title.

Doesn't our praise often feel torn up? It's as if we're reaching for something (Someone!) and never quite getting there because of something about ourselves or the people we're with or the setting or something. But we just end up tearing it up or at least getting it smudged and tattered.

It amazes me that God is interested at all. That he keeps on showing up for it. That he actually smiles at it. It reminds me of a poem by Billy Collins called "The Lanyard." I include it below, because it is "a picture of our torn up praise" that shows why God might not only accept, but cherish, our tattered and smudged prayers and songs.

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Smuggling, not snuggling

So, the guitarist for the band Korn has become a Christian. Very cool. But now he wants to make "Christian" clothes and stuff that's cool, because there's not a lot of cool Christian stuff out there. Hmm. I'm not too cool with Christian-cool. Sounds hokey. Sounds wannabe. Sounds irrelevant in the name of relevance.

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1498045/20050311/story.jhtml

See also Head's website:

headtochrist.com

Lord, save us from hip and make us real. Save us from cool and make us alive. Save us from relevant and make us relational. Save us from Christian consumerism and sink us into Christian community.

Help us to stop snuggling with the world for our own sakes and get back to smuggling the gospel into the world for its sake.

It's not about Me (it's about Us)

In the original stage play of The Sound of Music there’s a song that didn’t make it into more famous movie. It’s sung by Max (the family friend who arranges for the Von Trapp’s to sing in the festival at the end of the movie) and it’s a song of unabashed egotism. Part of it goes like this:

Every star and every whirling planet
Every constellation in the sky
Revolves around the center of the universe
A lovely thing called “I”

In other words, I am the center of the universe. My universe. If things don’t please royal Me, I’ll have nothing to do with them. If I’m not enriched in some way by you or God or church or the government or my next door neighbor or whatever, I reserve the right to turn my back, opt out, and do my own thing elsewhere. This is the essence of what many have come to call our “consumerist culture” in America. Everything is about Me.

But what happens when these divine, self-absorbed Me’s collide with each other?

A t-shirt I saw recently highlighted the clash: “It’s not you. It’s Me!” There can only be one center of the universe, and let me set you straight, you’re not it ... I am. But that only accentuates the clash of self-divine personalities, doesn’t it?

There’s an often-forgotten problem with placing myself at the center of the universe: It’s lonely. When everything is about me and I’m in the middle, I’m all alone. I will gladly have you around when you act how I want you to, but the only thing that ties us together is my good pleasure. When everything in my life is an opt-in/opt-out option—marriages, schools, worship services, jobs, friendships, prayer, whatever—the only one left over is me. I am a universe to myself.

But whenever I reduce it all to “me,” the “me” that I reduce it to is itself reduced. The less connected I am to others, the more adrift I am.

Christians refuse to think of ourselves as the center of the universe. I do not stand alone in the middle of things that revolve around me. No. God is at the center of all things. But even at the center of all things, God is not alone. As Christians, we believe that God is Trinity. So, at the center is not the biggest Ego of all, the biggest Me of all. At the center is God-in-relationship. At the center is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit loving, serving, enjoying, giving, submitting, praying, making, saving, playing, sanctifying with each other, for each other, to each other.

At the center of all things is not a Me. It’s an Us.

As Christians in church communities, we need to get us-ness into our very bones. We need it to shape the way we talk and eat and work and worship and spend our money. We need it to shape absolutely everything about who we are! Nothing we do is ever really private; it is always done in the context of relationships, even when it’s done when we’re by ourselves, because we are always connected to others. Recognizing and honoring and growing on those connections is essential to our health as persons and as a community.

How would Sunday morning worship change if you realized that you are truly connected to the others gathered with you? That worship isn’t something that you do for yourself (and, heaven’s, it’s certainly not about something so ego-driven as “centering yourself”!), but something you do for you-and-God and you-and-the-community, for us?

How would things change if the actually existence of the church wasn’t for our own sakes, but for the sake of God and the larger local community?

How would your money-spending change if you knew that your bank account doesn’t belong to you alone, but to God and to the others you share this world with?

What if your car wasn’t yours alone? Your phone? Your television? The food on your table? (I just noticed that I wasn’t able to keep away from using the word “your” with each of those things. Me-ness is so ingrained in who we are.)

We belong to God. And we belong to each other. Our church belongs to God. And it exists for the sake of the local community. If we get that inside of ourselves, we will become a truly missional people, a people who actively extend the love of God to one another and our city in both word and deed.

God's smuggler

I came across the following quote by movie director Danny Boyle at http://www.christianitytoday.com/movies/interviews/dannyboyle.html:

"... you've got to be, like Scorsese says, 'cunning.' You've got to smuggle good ideas into something that attracts that person to the Friday or Saturday night film. That way they get a bigger kick out of it than they do from those films you're talking about. That's the job. It's not like you've got to ban the bad films. You've just got to make better films more entertaining."

Danny Boyle (Danny Boy? Hmm) is referring to all of the junk movies that are tossed out there all the time. And he says that they're OK because they give people who need a laugh to make it through the day something to laugh at. Because people will always need to be entertained, those movies will always be around. But we need to "smuggle good ideas into something that attracts" as well.

It makes me wonder if this has something to do with the proclamation of the gospel.

Part of me says, "Absolutely!" and another part says, "Never!" Is this compromise or is it, in the words of Eugene Peterson, "telling it slant," telling the gospel in a way that it doesn't get rejected out of hand but gets inside of people by being "smuggled" around their barriers?

There is a time and a place for direct speech. Sermons are those (though not always, since people need to have ideas "smuggled" into them in sermons as well). In our info-glut society, there's a need for speech that is recognizably true and to the point. But there's also a need for speech that it parable-like, that sneaks its way into us by not activating our defense shields. And in our info-glut, we've got pretty good at activating those shields.

So, actually, I think that Boyle's comment is almost always true, but with occasional exceptions. We've got to be God's smugglers, importing the gospel into people's lives without their even knowing it.

i Heart Huckabee's

I just watched "I Heart Huckabee's" last night and had it bouning around in my head all night. The basic idea is of a team of existential detectives who examine people's lives, which was quite hilarious. At the same time, it made me think about what I do as a pastor. I try to look at all sorts of pieces of people's lives in order to make them make sense, similar to these detectives. But instead of talking about a big sheet of existence that all of time and space are a part of, I talk about God.

The existentialists in the movie were a sort of twisted Trinity, with one member being more like the devil, tempting to sin and dispair and emphasizing brokenness over unity, and there being no real savior at all. Other than that, there was no God at all. In fact, Dustin Hoffman's character's emphasis on a single "sheet" of existence that includes all of time and space excludes any kind of a God other than an ambivalent panentheism (everything that is exists within God).

Probably the best performance of Mark Wahlberg's career to date.

Any error about creation

"Any error about creation also leads to an error about God." -Thomas Aquinas

If God is the Creator, then thinking badly about and acting badly toward his creation is directly related with thinking badly about him and acting badly toward him, for the Creator is related to the creation.

If we believe that the creation exists around us merely to be used by us, then might it not also be true that we live and act and pray and worship as if God exists merely to be used by us as well?

If we believe, as many ancients did, that the creation is a wild and chaotic and terrible and unknowable thing around us that we need flee from into our safe and orderly cities, might we also believe the same of God and likewise flee from him? By the way, it's not just the ancients who believed this. Most city-dweller do, too. How many city-dwellers spend real time in the wild? Mostly, time is spent in houses and on paved roads, those life-lines of civilization.

What other errors about creation are we currently making right now? How are they affecting the way we approach God?

Is it OK to love myself?

St. Augustine's basic prayer with which he began his Confessions was "May I know Thee, O Lord, and also know myself." Dr. James Houston calls this the double-knowledge. He says that you can't know one without knowing the other. I don't really know myself unless I know God, and I don't really know God unless I know myself—both kinds of knowing are intertwined. I'd extrapolate from this that you can't love one without loving the other.

How can you love the one that loves you first unless you first know yourself as lovable?

One of the main problems I see today is the emphasis on "self-esteem," which has nothing to do with an accurate "self estimate." If we were to have an accurate self-estimate, we would see ourselves as sinners who are even so entirely lovable because we are loved by our heavenly Father. Instead, we opt for trying to think of ourselves as not-sinners. But since the evidence is very much to the contrary, we can't believe the real good stuff about ourselves. How can I be truly be lovable if I'm not the good person I try to think that I am? It doesn't work that way.

So, while our culture tries to love itself and fails, Christians try to think of themselves as above self-love.

It's reflected in our church slogans. So many of them say that what we're on about, in essence, is "Loving God. Loving People." Three churches I've come across this past week have that as their slogan. One church adds place to its love by adding the third phrase "Loving Corvallis" which is a good step forward. But none of them have the guts or even the inclination to put "Loving Ourselves." They'd probably think that that'd come across as narcissists instead of as honest Christians.

Our slogan at our church is "Meeting Jesus and Discovering Real Community, Real Worship, Real Life" -- the community part has to do with loving others; the worship part has to do with loving God; and the life part has to do with loving ourselves.

Is it true that we are loved by the Great Lover? If it is true, whatever we've done or not done, we are each entirely lovable because God in Christ has gone to the utmost in loving us. And that's something to build a life on.

238 miles of abba

It took him more than five hours to drive to Chicago, during which time he listened to "Dancing Queen" by ABBA more than 100 times in a row, stopping only for gas and other essential duties. The monotony was life-draining. (See http://www.coudal.com/abbavideo.php)

Genesis 1 reminds us that God is first and foremost the Creator. He is always creative and always creating. Although he may do things similarly from time to time, he doesn't like to repeat himself.

In an review of Wilco's Grammy-winning album "A Ghost is Born" which had its mixed reviews (by people other than me; I think it's brilliant), one reviewer wrote these words: “All of this carping about Jeff Tweedy -- what he should do, or whether he is on the decline, or whatever, illustrates the essential difference between fans and, say, friends. How would you like it if a friend said, ‘You were much better before, why don't you try to be like you used to be?’ or ‘I like this part of you, please repeat it endlessly for the rest of your working life.’ Fans are like leeches when they demand an artist continue to please them, like Tweedy is an organ grinder’s monkey or something."

Don't we do that to God, too? We want God to reproduce the same thing over and over and over again. That's what our technological society does. Machines are good at doing the same thing over and over again. They're not creative. But we are. And as Dorothy Sayers writes in her book The Mind of the Maker that creativity in us is directly related to our being created in God's image. We're the creative image of the Creator.

So, what does that say about salvation in Jesus and sanctification (holy-making) in the Holy Spirit? They are both creative acts. Both are acts whereby God takes his broken creation and makes something more from it than there was even before it was broken. The cracks and jagged edges get worked into something new and different and beautiful. And it's never, ever the same. There are no copyrights on any of us creations for none of us could ever be copied. Monotony, repetition, assembly lines, cookie cutter -- none of them have anything to do with who God is. And that's why we find them so deadening.

What tools to use

As we consider what it means to be church, dynamically moving forward the plot of God's great story of redemption, one of the things we need to consider and reconsider over and over again is the question: Why do we do what we do? A similar question is: Why aren't we doing something else?

There are many good reasons why we do what we do. And "because we always have" isn't as bad an answer as it has been made out to be. There is something to be said for tradition, for continuing something that has had value for many years even if we don't percieve that value at this very moment in time. Sometimes, neither the baby nor the bathwater should be tossed.

At the same time, "because it's new" isn't as bad an answer as it has been made out to be, either. Newer doesn't always mean improved, despite the commercials. But it can mean that. In fact, there are plenty of times when things that we've been doing recently have been more transitional than lasting. Is anyone nostalgic for the way radiation was used to treat cancer 30 years ago compared to the way treatments are done today? Is anyone completely satisfied with the way treatments are done today? Hopefully, newer will be better with cancer treatments. But we may have some pretty painful ground to traverse in the meantime.

When it comes to worship, art, music, liturgy, preaching styles, architecture, and other trappings must be considered to be what they in fact are: tools. None of them is the goal of worship. They are all means toward a goal, a goal which has far more to do with God than with the tools we use to connect with him. But the tools we use shape the way we worship. There can be no question about that at all.

When it comes to mission, we also need to consider and reconsider the tools we use. But in both cases we need to make sure that we know what we're on about before we get too caught up in the acquisition and admiration of tools.

One of the guys I like who things pretty well about tools that are both new and ancient in the context of worship is Jonny Baker. His blog site is http://jonnybaker.blogs.com/jonnybaker/.

If we'd just tithe ...

Look at these stats which I just came across in the Winter 2005 issue of Leadership Journal:

Total funds needed worldwide for unmet basic human needs—food, clean water, shelter, immunizations: $80 billion

Total if all U.S. church member increased giving to 10% of their income: $86 billion

I’m assuming that the $86 billion is in excess of the monies already gathered, meaning that we could take care of every human need on the planet just with monies raised by church-going Christians in the U.S.

If those numbers aren’t compelling, go to the website that Leadership Journal got the info from, emptytomb.org. It shows a count of the number of children around the world who have already died in 2005. The number was at 1,596,409 when I checked it at posting time.

Lord have mercy.

Got silence?

The fruit of silence is prayer;
The fruit of prayer is faith;
The fruit of faith is love;
The fruit of love is service;
The fruit of service is peace.
—Mother Theresa

These are the words that Mother Theresa had printed on her “business” card that she handed to people when they met her. There was no personal info on the card, just this. That tells me that not only did this sum up her approach to life, it summed up who she saw herself as a person.

Being the Church, Living the Kingdom

American Christians suffer from a terribly debilitating lack of imagination. And our eyesight it horribly shoddy, too.

Our imagination is poor because we have no picture in our minds, in our hearts of what God desires for us as individual Christians and as a church community. We simply take the salvation and forgiveness that is offered to us and go merrily on our way. But the image that Jesus painted (which is very similar to that painted by Moses and the prophets before him) was of the kingdom of God, of the reign of God in the world through transformed lives and a new way of living that transforms the world through the way we live.

Our eyesight is poor not because we can’t see what others are doing, but because we can’t see what we ourselves are doing. What would we see if we could see ourselves through the eyes of our dog or bank teller or next door neighbor or co-worker or fellow committee member or even of God himself? Does the idea of really seeing you as you actually are make you shiver? Should it?

Perhaps the first step toward an adequate imagination is better eyesight. In order to get anywhere, you first need to know where you are and where you’re going. Knowing where you are requires good eyesight, enabling you to see yourself as you really are; and knowing where you’re going requires good imagination (or “vision” as some people call it).

Sadly, whenever the pollsters examine the way that Christians live, they come up with devastating statistics. George Gallup talks about an “ethics gap—the difference between the way people think of themselves and the way they act.” Also responding to the data, Michael Horton says, “Christians are as likely to embrace lifestyles every bit as hedonistic, materialistic, self-centered, and sexually immoral as the world in general.”

Here’s some of the evidence against us:

• Only 8% of devout Christians tithe, with the more money we make resulting in smaller gifts.

• Annually, the average church member gives $20 to global outreach (social concerns and evangelism) but spends $164 on soft drinks and more than $1,000 on recreation. Meanwhile, more than a billion people worldwide survive on $1 a day.

• The most devout spend seven times as much time watching TV as we do praying, reading the Bible, and in worship.

• We still haven’t gotten over our racism, preferring not to have black neighbors.

• Our sexual practices are a mess, both before and during marriage.

There’s more. But I’m depressed enough already.

So, what’s to be done? If the promise of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit point to a whole new way of living that changes the way we act in the world, not just an individualized salvation, then something has to change. Otherwise, we’re frauds living a fraudulent faith.

Ron Sider makes some suggestions: “We need to recover the biblical truth that God is blazing holiness as well as overwhelming love. We need to recover the biblical teaching on the awfulness of sin and the necessity of repentance and sanctification. We need to turn away from American individualism and recover the New Testament understanding of mutual accountability. We need to bring all our people into small discipleship groups of genuine accountability so we can, as John Wesley said, ‘watch over one another in love.’ We need to rediscover the almost totally neglected biblical teaching on church discipline” (Ronald J. Sider, Prism, Jan-Feb 2004).

We need to make more than cosmetic changes to our churches and ourselves. I pray that the desire for transformation through the powerful love of Jesus will be a constant desire for ourselves, our churches, our cities, our country, our world. Then we will truly live the kingdom and be the church God dreams of. (This entry was inspired by a column by Ron Sider which can be found at: http://www.allelon.org/articles/article.cfm?id=174)

Lump

I just watched the newest Nooma video called Lump. Rob Bell has done another outstanding job, bringing together video and sermon. See Nooma.com and buy all ten videos!

Anyhow, in Lump, Bell's older boy gets caught, having stolen a little white ball. He runs upstairs and hides for two hours under the covers of his parents' bed, fearful and full of shame. When Bell goes upstairs, he uncovers the lump in the bed, holds him, and tells him that he'll never love him any less, no matter what he's done. Never.

Forgiveness is essential to living imago trinitas. It recognizes relationship is at the center of who God is and who we are as the image of the Trinity. It therefore recognizes that maintaining relational wholeness is the key to who we are. So, when sin breaks relationship, it's essential that we do what is necessary for reconciliation.

Trading plastic for plastic?

I just got a brochure from Aquire the Fire, the pump-'em-up teen event that tours around the nation. Being event-based, it's just about as cookie-cutter as you can get. It's ironic, then, that their brochure says, "Don't you just hate plastic Christianity? So do we." It has a bobble-head Jesus in between the question and the claim that "so do we." But isn't this just a trading of one kind of plastic for another?

What is "imago trinitas"?

The Latin phrase "imago dei" means "image of God." It refers to all of the ramifications of being created as the image of God in the world. The Latin phrase "imago trinitas" means "image of the Trinity" and takes that idea of being created in the image of God and considers what it means to be created in the image of a God who is Trinity.

If God is Trinity, then there are some things about God that aren't true (e.g. God is not individualistic), because other things about God are in fact true (e.g. God always has existed and always will exist as Community). If these things are not true or true about God and we are created in the image of God, then they are correspondingly not true or true of us as well.

That is what I want to explore and would love to have you explore with me.