Adam & Eve, the Apple, the Snake and the Apartment Kids

And Another Thing . . . The Perished Kingdom

We have started to tell “The Story of God” at church on Sunday and at a local apartment complex on Thursday nights.  We sent postcards to everybody in the complex, around 200 units. I have heard in church-planting circles that such mailings typically elicit a .5% response, which is exactly what happened. One person from the complex showed up. A few of our people gathered with this individual and we had a great conversation. That was week number one.

Tonight was week number two and our lone respondent returned. Then, as we got ready to begin our discussion, one of our crew noticed a bunch of junior high kids playing outside the clubhouse. He invited them to join us—and amazingly, they did. I asked them their names and a little about themselves. Most did not go to a church, some did not believe in God, and most had never heard the Bible story of the creation and the fall.  A few knew about Adam and Eve and a little bit about an apple. One said, “Maybe there was a snake.”

So we told the story. We told about how God created the world, about the garden, Adam and Eve, about the snake—the temptation by the devil. We spent a little time talking about how God immediately promised to send his son to crush the serpent’s head. I was amazed at how many of these kids stayed engaged.

They listened. Asked questions. Wondered if we’d be back next week. 

Oh yes, we absolutely will be back next week. 

In telling this story to kids who had barely or never heard it reminded me of how foundational Genesis 3 is to the whole Christian faith. The seeds of all that will follow are in this story. The beauty of creation is broken. God’s intended kingdom perishes and is replaced by death, pain and lies. The world that humans were created to inhabit is lost. They are exiled from the garden of God. The potency of the adversary’s lie changes the story arc. Man is aligned with a new father. John 8:44 says, “You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

Before we swallowed the forbidden fruit, humans lived in a world of clarity. With the knowledge of good and evil came confusion. Before the Fall, man’s perspective and God’s perspective were one. There was no such thing as doubt. Satan asks, “Did God really say . . .” and doubt emerges into the world. The forbidden tree’s name, “good and evil,” implies choice. With choice comes confusion. When humans separate from God everything gets murky. Paul says, “. . .now we see through a glass, darkly. . . .” Now humans must choose. In a world where lies exist, every truth becomes suspect. 

The good news is that, in Genesis 3:15, God promises that man’s new father, the father of lies, will one day be crushed. The first hint of Jesus entering the world to save lost humans is predicted within minutes of the Fall. God moves immediately to rescue the world he loves. 

When Jesus appears on the scene he challenges Satan’s rule. In John 10:10 he says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” In John 10:15 he says, “. . . I lay down my life for the sheep.” And in John 14:6 he says, “. . . I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Truth is the way to life; the way to the Father. God overcomes the lies of the enemy with the truth of his son sent to crush the serpent’s head. Second Corinthians 5:19 says, “For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people's sins against them.” 

God undoes all that Satan did in the garden.

In Genesis 3 God promises to rescue man from the destruction of the Fall. In Revelation, at the end of the story, Jesus declares, "Look, I am making everything new!"

I hope our new friends at the apartment complex will be back to hear the rest of the story. It’s a good one.

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now!

Of Politics and The Intended Kingdom

And Another Thing . . . The Intended Kingdom

In the midst of a political season, it is interesting to think about God’s intended Kingdom.. Politics can be nasty and divisive (especially in October of a Presidential election year), but at democracy’s core, I believe there is an underlying desire to make things better. We want a government that lifts burdens and inspires hope while facilitating opportunities for prosperity in a just and unencumbered way. We want our society to reflect the good place we imagine in our head. Inherent in all of us is a sense of longing – a feeling that we have been displaced from our intended dwelling. As C. S. Lewis wrote in Till We Have Faces,

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home?”

Eden was God’s vote for what life should be like. It was perfect. All of the painful issues that rage against life were absent.  There was no death or illness. No hunger. No war. No religion. No sorrow. No politics. No racial divides. No classes (social, economic or otherwise). No lack of understanding. We were in perfect harmony with God and with nature and with one another. I can only imagine.

God, the three in one, chose to make humans “in our image.” God’s three members are perfectly distinct and perfectly one—each separate and yet connected. This connectedness is an essential part of creation. God is connected to everything in the beginning and in Eden all of God’s distinct creation is harmoniously married to the Creator and to each other. This is our intended natural state and it still exists as the quiet longing that is at the heart of all of our striving.

We see injustice in the world and intuitively know that this is different, somehow, from the way it was supposed to be. We see suffering and something in our gut tells us that only a broken system would allow this. We see abuse and react with incredulity and an impulse to set it right. As Joni Mitchell sang, “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

East of Eden the clarity of the garden gets fuzzy. God pronounced everything in the garden “good.” Outside of the garden people pronounce all sorts of other things “good,” and pursue them with a noble passion. In his book Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton puts it this way:

“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered . . . it is not merely the vices that are let loose. . . . the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”

Chasing after virtues is an attempt to get back home. We were intended for perfection. So we struggle to make the world right, finding that the task is too much for us, but it is not too much for God. Second Corinthians 5: 19 says, “For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation.” 

The whole story of God is about God’s love creating a perfect place for his creation and then sacrificing himself to get us back to the life he designed for us. “For God loved the world he gave . . . .” 

So God is reconnecting people to himself through the gift of his son, Jesus. Through Jesus he is making all things new. God is fixing the mess we made of things. 

In the meantime, here is some advice for surviving this political season. 

“I met those of our society who had votes in the ensuing election, and advised them, 1. To vote, without fee or reward, for the person they judged most worthy: 2. To speak no evil of the person they voted against: And, 3. To take care their spirits were not sharpened against those that voted on the other side.”  

                                 John Wesley, October 6, 1774

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now!

Friends, Timing and the Grace of God

And Another Thing . . . Remembering a Friend

“Friends,” Tony Campolo once said, “are people with whom you share your heresies.”

It is an exhilarating surprise to find yourself in a place where you don’t have to be careful; where you feel safe enough to say scary things. In a world where everyone is taught to play it safe, a friend is someone with whom to share the dangerous edges of life. To modify Shakespeare’s Lear, with a friend you can “speak what you feel, not what you ought to say.”

This kind of friendship is hard to find. It is a rare sort of alchemy that can coalesce a climate of freedom and emotional security with an intellectual curiosity and acceptance.  In this mix, great things can happen. And, even if they don’t, everyone laughs and has a good time. I have been blessed to have a few of these rare creatures inhabit my life.  One such person was Gary Rowe.

Gary’s birthday was October 9. He died last year, two weeks after turning 55. He has been missed. So today, a few of us got together and celebrated his life without the privilege of his presence. We met for lunch (since Gary was a foodie, this seemed appropriate). Gary was a wise and avid learner who never lost interest in his world, while also remaining a big fan of “The Three Stooges” and Groucho Marx. He had the rare ability to give helpful advice and poke fun at you at the same time. He was an enormous smart  . . . aleck, and a genuine friend.

I am grateful to have known him.

But I believe I had some help with that.

Acts 17:26 says, “. . . and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.”

C. S. Lewis writes,

“. . . we think we have chosen our peers. In reality, a few years' difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another, posting to different regiments, the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting—any of these chances might have kept us apart.  But for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances.  A secret Master of the Ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you," can truly say to every group of Christian friends, "You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another."

The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by Friendship, God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties, derived from Him—and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing. At this feast, it is He who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.

Jesus said, “I have called you friends.” I want to say thank you.

Friendship is another one of God’s great ideas. I am glad that God pulled Gary and Rich and Tommy and David and Greg and Robby and Tim and Dan and Kent and Bill and Paul and . . . (you get the idea) into my life. Not to mention Kim and Kelsey and Kaleigh and Noah, and, oh, Mom and Dad and Sue and Sherri and . . .  (once again, you get the idea). God has brought amazing people into my “times” and “places.”

He is good.

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now.

---

The Mustard Seed Conundrum

And Another Thing . . . Mustard Seed

Matt 17:20 “. . . Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

I am not a farmer. I am not very agricultural—or mechanical, or handy, or any number of other helpful life skills. When Jesus says, “. . . if you have faith as small as a mustard seed” I have no real context for it. I used to pull the weeds in my mother’s garden, and I think I planted something in a Styrofoam cup once for school, but I have no deep well of “seed” knowledge to draw from when reading this scripture. I just read the word “small”, and then read “as a mustard seed” which for me translates into “really small.” In studying this passage I learned that while there are even smaller seeds in the east, in Jesus’ time the “mustard seed” was proverbial for tiny. So what Jesus was saying is that faith is incredibly potent. Faith is turbo-charged potency on steroids. It doesn’t take much of the stuff to make a big things happen.

Encountering this verse makes me think that my faith must be comparable to one of those even smaller seeds, because the idea of moving a mountain seems impossible. It seems the tiny amount of potency required to accomplish this enormous task is way beyond my reach. Which I think is the correct conclusion and part of the point that Jesus is making. It feels impossible because it is impossible for me. I look at it (the mountain), and then at me (my assessment of my own ability) and conclude that in the battle between the mountain and me, the mountain will win. Jesus says in Luke 18:27, “What is impossible with men is possible with God." The essence of faith is getting out of your own head and into the mind of God. Jesus is saying (at least in my opinion), “If you could just see the world the way I do you could accomplish anything.” 

The trouble is I do not see the world the way he does. I see it with my fallen, practical eyes and my faithless, semi-reasonable mind. I tend to be a matter-of-fact, cautious, and self-protective person who is afraid to explore the necessarily ambiguous regions of faith. Jesus says that my idea of “possible” and his are vastly different. I have to accept this by faith because his idea is in conflict with my own. I find that my “smaller seed” sized faith is still trying to apply reason to a truth that is larger than me. My reasoning becomes a limit. My theoretical construct conceives an explanation which must necessarily be a miscarriage of the truth I hope to understand.

So how am I supposed to embrace this thing that is outside of my ability to comprehend? The simple answer is to trust God with it. Proverbs 3:5-6 says to “Trust in the Lord with all your heart; (and) do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take.”

The secret to getting our faith up to “mustard seed” status is to trust God. I can hear the groans as I uncork this Christian platitude. Trust feels intellectually lazy and is emotionally unsatisfying. It is a theological sound-bite that is mouthed by many and seemingly understood by few. It is the thing that is said when nothing else makes sense. Trust is a catch-all. It is also the truth. When we depend on our own understanding we mess things up. When we are faced with impossibility, we must trust God. The only way to step into the improbable is to trust the person who is asking you to take the improbable step.

This is a difficult idea to discuss and an even more difficult one to live out. Paul settled this conundrum in his own life by saying, “I can do everything through him who gives me strength.” (Phil: 4:13). God’s strength moves in us to do things we know we could never do on our own. His strength makes everything possible—including moving our “smaller seed” size faith up to the size of a “mustard seed.” As faith increases, mountains get wobbly.

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now.

Our Refugee Family Arrives

And Another Thing . . . Refugee Family

This week, much of my time was spent in preparing for the arrival of our Refugee family, and so this morning I thought I would send out an abbreviated blog.

The Gathering Community rallied this week to furnish an apartment with beds, dressers, table and chairs, couch and recliners, food, clothes and much more. On Friday the stuff we collected and the people we were giving them to all came together. Lots of smiles and nods, faces straining to understand, the joy of watching a baby play in her new home all coalesced as we listened to the interpreter and tried to make new friends. It is awkward to sit in a room where the differences between us are so large. There is a language barrier and a huge cultural barrier. The interpreter is himself a refugee who came to Indy three years ago. Today he has learned English, works as a nursing assistant and volunteers for Exodus Refugee Immigration. He is excited about his new life and is already trying to pay it forward. He believes that he is the only one who speaks this language in the city. 

I know very few of the particulars about these young ladies. I may never know much of their story. My assumption is that there were some very hard things that spurred this dramatic move. They stepped out in faith with the hope of finding a better life. Our gathering in their new apartment on Friday was an important step in this new adventure. As we were trying to get to know them, we asked if there was anything they would like to do in their new town. They answered, “We would like to worship.” 

So, it turns out that in spite of all of the barriers, we have much in common. We love our children. We hope for better days. We laugh and cry, and we worship Jesus. 

When we signed up to help a Refugee family relocate I believed there was a good chance we would be called to serve people who were from a different faith. My prayer was that we would faithfully serve whoever He brought us as an expression of his love and ours. And so he brought us sisters.

Our new sisters will be joining us at The Gathering this week. Come meet them and let’s join with them in worshiping the God who does such great things.

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now.

Love, Truth & Church

And Another Thing . . . Love, Truth & Church

My parents were church goers. So when I was a kid, I went to church too. The church of my childhood was the non-instrumental Church of Christ. This was a great church to begin in because they were big on teaching young people about the Bible. Every Sunday night, all the children five and older were asked to come up front and share a verse they had memorized that week. The preacher would then quiz the kids about the Bible. I remember as a preschooler sitting with my parents and longing for the day when I could go up too. I learned a lot about the Bible in that church.

In fact, I enjoyed many things about the CoC. It was only when I was older and began to understand their take on biblical truth that I experienced a growing sense of estrangement. As a kid, I felt loved and included. I especially enjoyed listening to the a cappella singing. It was fun to hear men and women singing, from the shaped-note songbook, the harmonies to all of the old hymns. Shaped-notes were a now archaic musical notation system that made it easier to read and then sing harmony and our church would teach new members this system, as well as how to use a pitch pipe, and to lead hymns in 4/4 time. My early perspective was that shaped-notes were somehow more spiritual. 

Superior spirituality was an underlying theme in my formative Christian journey—a theme that was subtle and somewhat insidious. The fact that it affected me the way that it did may have more to do with my weaknesses than any intention on the part of my teachers, but I nevertheless interpreted what I learned as “My group is right and everyone else is wrong.” My knowledge, my truth, nurtured a sense of moral superiority. Paul admonishes believers to, “speak the truth in love.”(Eph 4:15) This has always been a tricky thing to pull off. First Corinthians 8:1 says, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” I fear that much of my early Biblical learning resulted in a puffing up rather than a building up. Love gets messy, but truth feels clean and clarifying. Love involves giving of our self and dealing with all of our own insecurities in the process. Truth is of the mind and insulates our feelings and elevates our perspective above the fray of frailty. The challenge is to marry the two. To speak truth in the midst of our relationships with an awareness of our mess and insecurity is the call of the church. Love without truth is blind. Truth without love has clarity, but it isolates. Truth spoken with love directs, connects and elevates.

In the parlance of the KJV, the church is called to be a peculiar people. We are to love one another and the world like Jesus does. Unfortunately, it has become a cliché that our culture is frustrated and at times even disgusted with the church. Much of the atheism creeping into today’s culture has, at its root, a hurt or disappointment with people who claimed to be followers of God. Many are open to Jesus but are leery of his people. Not all of this is the fault of the church, but a significant portion of those who now doubt the church have been shaped by an encounter with her truth untempered by her love. Second Corinthians 5:14 says “Christ’s love compels.” God’s love is what changes everything. It is what changed each of us who claim to be Christ-followers. It is what changed me. 

The love I felt in the hearts of the good people of the CoC was the first taste of a reality I would continue to experience over and over again throughout my life. Later, I, too, witnessed hypocrisy and disappointment and doubted the truth of the Christian faith. It was the love of friends who were believers who showed me the reality of a God whose story I doubted, but whose love compelled. 

God’s love draws and changes us. 

God’s truth liberates and leads us. 

God’s Son makes all things new.

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now!

Screaming Mee Mee-E's and Changing Your Mind

And Another Thing . . . Change Your Mind 

As the Christmas of my eighth year of life approached, I was busy making a large list of all the things I either seriously needed or desperately wanted. Before the Internet existed, the Montgomery Ward Christmas catalogue served as the source of childhood fantasy. I stared at the pages in that brightly colored booklet the way my own children now watch YouTube videos of the things they desire. At the top of my list that year was the Screaming Mee Mee-E rifle. (Here is a link-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeSpk6YQw4o-- so you can see the thing my dreams were made of.). I wanted this toy badly. 

As it turns out, my grandmother owned a children’s clothing store, and when we arrived in Kentucky for our annual family Christmas vacation, I learned that the grand prize in her Christmas contest was the aforementioned Screaming Mee Mee-E rifle. I could not believe it. There was the source of my Christmas wish vision being proudly displayed by my own grandmother in the boys section of her store. To say that I started begging and lobbying for that gun would be an understatement. I don’t remember the full extent of my pleading, but I know that it was so outlandish enough that my parents were embarrassed and made me stop.  But of course, by then the case had been made and my strategy worked. On Christmas morning I received the object of my desire. I eagerly removed it from its box, loaded its screaming dart, aimed and pulled the trigger. The dart flew out of the gun with a screaming sound that immediately annoyed the adults in the room—and, in a few short moments, even began to annoy me. Also, the dart did not go nearly as far as it had appeared to in the commercials. Horrifyingly for me, within about 15 minutes I was bored with the toy. But because I had made such a big deal about wanting it, I felt obligated to fake it for a while—even though it fell far short of my expectations. So after getting what I thought I wanted, I quickly changed my mind.

The notion of changing your mind is the thought behind the biblical word repent. The story of my Christmas gun has been repeated many times in my life, and I suspect most of us can relate to chasing something only to find it is not what we hoped it would be. Many things in our life look different when they move from fantasy to reality. Solomon, who is said to be the wisest man who ever lived, declared in Ecclesiastes that “everything is meaningless.” The King James Version of the Bible translates this passage as, “all is vanity.” Mick Jagger later translated it as “I can’t get no satisfaction.” Solomon concludes Ecclesiastes by saying, “Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.” In other words, you cannot be the source of your own fulfillment. Only God can fill the emptiness we carry with us.

The process of moving from a life of self-directed ambition to a life of faith begins with learning to believe in God and then growing to understand that his plan for your life is both different and better than the choices you have been making. The second step, after believing in God, is to repent or change your mind about what is important in life. You change your mind about chasing after meaningless vain things in hopes of finding some sort of fulfillment. Jesus’ counterintuitive declarations begin to make sense, like when he says in Matthew 10:39, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” 

Whether it is a Screaming Mee Mee-E gun, a house, a job, or a relationship, unless we are seeking first his kingdom and his righteousness all of these other things will ultimately feel meaningless. Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Changing our minds to recognize that there is a way more compelling than our own enlightened self-interest reveals the possibility of walking in a hope that is beyond what we can see. 

In our natural state, we are all Screaming Mee Mee-E’s and at some point we become annoying even to ourselves. The good news is that God has made a way for us to change our minds, even about ourselves.

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now!