Below are the ads. Please feel free (in fact, be encouraged) to post them at Facebook, Twitter and/or anywhere else you deem worthy.

Like I said, we think they’re funny ads and that folks will enjoy them. We also hope they  help connect folks to the work we’re doing. While we don’t take ourselves too seriously, we do take seriously the work we are privileged to do, currently meaning the CMY(K) project.

Let’s not allow tragedy to be the only occasion for our engagement with darkness and brokenness. Let’s not wait until “something has “happened” before acting. Or, at least, let’s only act when ‘something has happened.’

Artist Makoto Fujimura, who was a resident of Manhattan on the morning of Sept 11, 2001, writes

“We have to realize that before any of these terrorist acts were committed, they were imagined… If we do not teach our children, and ourselves, that what we imagine and how we design the world can make a difference, the culture of cynicism will do that for us… if we do not take the initiative to help our children imagine better neighborhoods and cities, despair will ruin their imaginative capacities and turn them into destructive forces. These are the lessons of 9/11.”

One of the ongoing tragedies of our Sept. 11 remembrance is that, for many among us, our only knowledge of the Middle East and with Arab culture is only informed by cable news accounts of violence. Many of us lack an imaginative understanding of the culture from which such violence or hatred grew.  This ensures that the misunderstanding and suspicion that often marks East-West relationships will continue.

Compassion International was in Haiti on January 12, 2010 when the earthquake struck.  In fact, they’d been there for 40 years. Compassion staff knew what to do and how to help because they had the lay of the land already. They knew who to help and who to trust.  They had the names and knew the situations of 65,000 children throughout Haiti, 6400 of them living It Port Au Prince where the quake was most devastating. Compassion had committed to an ongoing relationship with Haiti as a country and to its people as.. well.. as people.  When disaster struck, those relationships provided clarity of purpose and action.

Compassion’s work is a model to me for engagement with darkness and brokenness in general; to commit, relationally to a place and a people and allow my action to spring from love in that relationship rather than only from crisis.

But being a parent for all of 11 months now I’ve quit on comparisons; none suffice.  Sitting on the floor watching my son learn to shape words and use his fingers is like nothing else.  It is, in fact, the kind of experience I refer other things to in order to clarify them.**

But that thought got me thinking about those ‘other’ experiences of life and the strong possibility that I cheapen my days by comparing them to other days; just like I cheapen my relationships by comparing them to other relationships.

Sitting on the floor with my son is a particular moment. It is a true moment because, in the absence of comparison or evaluation, that moment can simply be.  I don’t judge it or examine it or attempt to “learn from it.” I can only receive it.. as I would a gift. After all, it is a gift, isn’t it?

I’d like to learn to receive the whole of my life the way I’m receiving fatherhood.  To see a friendship as that friendship instead of one among a “network” of relationships.  To fully be present in whatever city I am in rather than to be “on tour.”

Perhaps this is what the Psalmist had in mind when writing..

“This is the day the LORD has made,
We will rejoice and be glad in it.”

**Some will undoubtedly say that my experience as a father is informed by my Heavenly Father’s relationship to me (or to us, as it were).  I’m finding quite the opposite to be true. The concept of “God as Father” is taking shape in light of my fatherhood.

I recently took part in a panel discussion entitled “Conversations With My Inner Atheist.”  The stated purpose of the discussion was to “normalize the faith struggle,” During the conversation, a few ideas shone through.  One of them was the idea of “chutzpah.”  The other was the idea that certainty is not the aim of faith…

Certainty is not the aim of faith. The life of faith is always a life of trust and risk.  Increasingly so. Faith moves us past our fear into active relationship with God, one another and with the world.

In contrast, the pursuit of certainty can be immobilizing. Can you be certain that your partner or spouse will be faithful to you? No. You can take their word for it and believe that their character is stalwart… but you may be wrong (as many among us know, painfully).  If I wait to be certain of someone’s character before entering into relationship with them, I will never enter in.  At some point, I trust what I have come to know and step, in faith, into the relationship regardless but aware of the areas I cannot be certain of.

Can I be certain that the medication I’m receiving will help and not hurt me? No. But I take it trusting what I have come to know about medicine and my Doctor.

Can I be certain that if I fall backwards off this bench, these kids will catch me? No. But I do it anyway. (<— you should really take 15 seconds to watch that)

Can I be certain that the words I’ve shared in confidence will remain a secret between that friend and I? No, but I can choose to believe my friend’s word that they will keep it.

Can I be certain that my job will pay enough to cover whatever expenses might come up? No.

Can I be certain that when I need it, my community will catch me

…that my wife and I will have a healthy child? …or that I’ll be around long enough to raise her/him?

No.

There is nothing certain.

Nothing.

All is faith.

And so the Christian call to faith is less of an absurdity that it seems at first.  Especially since at it’s core it is a call to trust and believe that the end of things is good; that if it is not good, then it is not the end; that God desires justice and health and wholeness.. .and that the darkness will not prevail.  And the belief that good wins helps us move through fear into active relationship with God, one another and with our world.

Certainty is not the aim of faith. A life well-lived.. a live lived at all, is the aim of faith.

**Abusive childhoods leading to questions of God’s sincerity…
**A knowledge of global injustice leading to questions of God’s ‘goodness’…

**Confusion regarding God’s violent character and rhetoric in the Old Testament…

**Difficulty drawing ‘in vs out’ lines between heterosexual and homosexual friends…

The idea was not so much to assuage the doubts associated with these questions but provide whatever sense of normalization might come from hearing older, wiser and fully-engaged christian men and women airing their grievances with God and struggles with faith.

Three ideas came to the forefront during our discussion.  The first I’ll make brief comments about now while the other two I’ll tinker with in posts over the next week or so.

First, while the pastoral impulse in me was (and generally is) to fix and heal whatever wounds of history, spirit and mind were aired during the session, there was something close to magical in the simple act of sharing our humanity for a while.  As one of the panel participants put it, “these two words can take you a long way in life and in ministry:

‘Me, too.’ ” .. shared humanity

As I thought of the many scenarios in my history that have led to serious questions about the reality or goodness of God and of Life, I remembered that ‘answers’ never did my soul much good.. Instead it was the presence of others who had shared or were currently sharing my grief or my struggle that saved me.

A further step in this thought process led me to the very Story we hold in question when our certainty wanes. It is, oddly enough, a story in which Jesus himself has reservations about “The Plan.” (http://bible.cc/matthew/26-39.htm)  It is a story in which the pivotal moment is when God, the One who sets the very stage where all our comedies and tragedies take place, says two words that go a very long way in life and in ministry…

“‘Me, too.” … shared humanity.

Over the next week or so, I’ll be posting thoughts about the other two ‘ideas’ that shone during our discussion. Namely..

…that “chutzpa” is a necessary and responsible religious posture. Chutzpa, in the religious sense, means having the guts to face God and say “I disagree.”

And lastly, that certainty is not the aim of faith. That, in fact, making certainty a goal in any area of life can be, and often is a recipe for existential paralysis.

(A few weeks ago, I taught on King David and particularly the way his identity defined his life’s work. This is a reflection from that teaching.  Below is a short audio excerpt from the sermon)

I sincerely believe God makes promises.  Those promises can be awfully confusing in light of our circumstances.

Just before the prophet Samuel anointed David King of Israel he had installed Saul as King of Israel. What this meant for David was that he had to wait. Having been given this promise of identity, David then had to live for a time under circumstances that did not at all reflect that promise. In fact, during that time of waiting David has to serve and obey the man who “stood in the way” of his promised destiny.

Maybe you were promised something. Or maybe there is something you have always known about yourself but your life’s circumstances have dictated something different.  Do you trust the things you were promised or do your circumstances dictate your understanding of yourself?

I’m not referring to the the scenario in which someone of my build laments his “shoulda-been” days as an NFL linebacker.  This can obviously be abused and misunderstood…

…but after a series of failed relationships, should you buy the idea that you’ll always have to settle for a man whose love and consideration are fleeting at best?

…or after years of toiling away at jobs that suck the life out of you, should you buy the idea that you’ll never have fulfilling work doing something you’re good at; work that adds beauty to the world?

…and then there is this general “promise” many of us have some strange inkling of that some “good” is to come of all this.

I sincerely believe God makes promises. Some of them are quite personal and some are general.  I want those promises to shape my hopes and expectations for my life and the lives of those I love rather than bow to the circumstances I often find myself in which say “those good things cannot be.”

Waiting On A Promise (2min Sermon Clip)

My son would only sleep while either I held him or rested him on my chest.  This meant that I could not sleep for fear of dropping the little bean.  Exhausted, I called my mother… at 3am (something I hadn’t done since high school).  I said “I’m toast and could use some help.”  By the time I had finished the word “help,” she was at the door.

I handed my son over (who immediately stopped crying and went to sleep because grandmas are made of fairy dust and white magic) and started to head downstairs to crash.  Then my mother said this:

“You’ll miss this, you know. He won’t always want to fall asleep on you.”

That changed everything for me. I realized that the problems I was dealing with were attached to circumstances I would dearly miss when they had passed.  This goes beyond knowing that “nothing worth doing is easy to do.” It was more like realizing that embracing the goodness of a gift means not just “dealing” with the problems that come with it but even accepting those problems as part of the gift.

There has been a truckload of speculation about “The Lost Years” of Jesus. (The gap between the second and third chapters of Matthew, for instance.) The popularity of these conjectures waxes and wanes from season to season.  Some suggest he traveled to Asia. Some suggest he travelled to India. Some suggest He was separated from his family at the Great Barrier Reef, caught up by a fishing boat and then ended up in a dentist’s office (*). It’s all very interesting but I see this kind of thinking as reflective of something much sadder than creative history-making..

I believe the deceptive and short-sighed speculations about Jesus’ mystic journey during the “lost years” are rooted in an elitist spiritual mindset in which ‘common’ people are incapable of significant lives; a mindset in which only “trained personnel” can enter the back-room where the real work is done.

“But,” you might say, “Jesus wasn’t a ‘common’ person. He claimed to be the Messiah. He said He was God.”

An excellent point. Thank you for bringing it up.

I, too believe that Jesus was ‘uncommon’ in that He was exactly who He claimed to be.  Yet, before he began teaching and healing, Jesus lived a life for years that nobody thought was significant enough to record.

He worked with his hands as a carpenter. 
He lived as a son and a brother in a particular family.
He lived as a neighbor in a particular neighborhood.

It is as if God took sincere interest in the ‘common’ life… which might mean we need to change the way we understand ‘ordinary’ or ‘mundane’ things. Perhaps nothing is ‘common’ in the way we often mean it.

Thinking of my community, here are some particular examples of what I think Jesus’ years as an ‘ordinary’ person say to us..

Being a mother is significant. It is, in fact, sacred work.
Being a neighbor is significant, It is, in fact, sacred work.
Being a business owner is significant. It is, in fact, sacred work.
Being a public educator is significant. It is, in fact, sacred work.

For the sake of clarity, I’m not saying that being any of these works is sacred because it gives us a platform to “talk about Jesus” or “lead people to faith.” The work itself is sacred work insofar as it is the work we were given to do by God and so long as treat it that way.

Significance and the Lost Years of Jesus (4min Sermon Clip)

Jesus submitted to the baptism of John. Part of what that means to me is that Jesus accepted being part of the tradition he would be known for criticizing.

Critique from within has power.
Critique from without is most often just noise.

If I stand at a distance from your life or community and point out at what is wrong, you should honestly care very little what I think.** But If I am committed to your life or community for the long haul, my criticism is then worth listening to.  Critique from within carries with it the weight of responsibility; the responsibility to help make right what you’ve seen is wrong.

Critique from without often smacks of judgement and casual inconvenience which is why it is commonly and rightfully met by the challenge “who are you to to tell me…?”

It is easy enough to find wrong in our traditions or institutions; religious, public or otherwise. What is of greater difficulty and greater importance is to take enough ownership of our place within our institutions to make our criticism count for something.

(**There are, of course, exceptions to this. They are rare. But the do exist.)

Belonging to one another comes at a cost

I sat in a service recently that was not at all my cup of tea.  Between the style and execution of music, the topic and conclusions of the sermon and the general demographic of the congregation I felt about as out of place as I have ever felt in a church.  These were not at all ‘my people’ and more to the point, I am certainly not one of theirs.

But as I sat there settling comfortably into my “otherness” I remembered a scene from CS Lewis’ “Screwtape Letters” in which the tormenting demon was bid tempt his charge to examine his fellow church-goers and see their lowliness and otherness;” to conclude that he could not belong to “those people” for many of the same reasons I was mentally disassociating myself from the christians I was sitting with that morning.

When the band struck up again, I still noticed and disliked the song selection and even moreso the horrible electric-drum-kit sound.  But I opened my mouth and joined the congregation in song, moving to the aisle with the others in my row. I walked down to towards the stage behind a woman who was wearing a perfume that must have been named “Wild Berry Menthol Mist.” She turned and smiled after having taken the bread and wine that was now being offered to me.

“The body of Christ, broken for you.”  I took it and ate
“The blood of Christ, shed for you.”  I took it and drank.. and realized it was juice rather than wine.. but whatever..

And walking back to my seat I stood a bit closer to the pudgy, middle-aged man next to me who couldn’t stay in the same singing key for more than a phrase or two.. and sang with him.

One of the great challenges of the christian life is actually belonging to people you don’t like, don’t understand or with whom you do not fully agree.*  We spend much of our social energy trying to surround ourselves with a tribe of people more fully reflective of ourselves. Then, in christian teaching, we are asked to do something quite dramatic: to dissolve those expectations and receive into our lives anyone God gives us to.

This costs us.

It costs our levels comfort. It can cost us in our other relationships to be associated with someone who is politically or theologically outside the lines for the rest of our immediate tribe. It surely costs us to belong to people whose lives implode repeatedly due to their own foolish decision making. On and on.. Belonging to someone else, much less a community comes at a cost.  We call that cost “sacrifice” and it lies at the heart of healthy relationships.

And so the communion meal stands at the center of christian community, reminding us that being family means sacrifice. Real sacrifice.  A shade of the sacrifice that makes our community possible in the first place.

Belonging to One Another (3:43 Sermon Clip)

* (It’s a fallacy that christians are, on the whole, entirely like-minded. I’d argue that the range of sociological, political and religious thought within christian culture is at least as diverse as almost any other identifiable people group around.)