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It’s Still Easter, God

July 22, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Spirituality & Prayer with 6 Comments

Dear God, it’s still Easter.

I know you know this, but… well… It doesn’t look like it so much.

This week the news feed indicated a world where the Curse was found far and wide, but all too little of the blessings flowing.

So here’s where I’m at in all this: you’ve got a bunch of us here who are telling the world, in faith, that you have raised Jesus from the dead.

That you have overcome the powers of sin and death.

That you have enthroned your Man at your right hand.

That there is a King reigning over the cosmos for the true and living God.

That Jesus is Lord.

It’s Easter!

So why should they say among the nations, “Where is this God of yours? Where is your Lord?”

We can confess that Jesus is Lord, but when we read about massacres in movie theaters, it makes our claim ring hollow.

We can confess that Jesus is Lord, but when we blow up the internet with our intramural disagreements one might well ask, “Where is this Spirit who is supposed to be leading them into all truth? Where is this Spirit who is supposed to be binding them as one?”

Where, indeed, is the Spirit sent by the Resurrected One?

It’s still Easter.

I know that you care about your reputation. You are the God who acts to demonstrate the goodness and power of your name upon the earth. You are the God who will not sit idly by while your name is blasphemed among the gentiles.

So I guess where I’m going with all this is here: I don’t mind saying audacious things. Really. In fact, I know several people who wish I minded a bit more!

But when it comes to the audacious things of God, well… I… actually, a lot of us… well… we’d like a little more backup.

You have your Man on the throne. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him.

So, do you think we could see a tidal wave of peace? An earth-shattering abundance of food for those who have none? A few minutes of clarity that there is a plan here, there is a God whose power can bring it about, there is a people who rightly confess the God who rules in righteousness by the hand of a Resurrected King?

Maybe what I’m getting at is this: May your Kingdom come, may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Because this wasn’t much of an “as it is in heaven” week.

So come quickly, Lord Jesus. You are the Resurrected Lord, after all.

It’s Still Easter–So the Church Might Yet Live

July 2, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Spirituality & Prayer with 7 Comments

The most difficult thing for us as Christians to receive, believe, and embody is that we serve the God who gives life to the dead.

I experience this dearth in myself.

I go into churches that were once vibrant, bustling, packed. And I experience hopelessness at the sight of classrooms become storage closets. I feel the emptiness, so much emptiness, in the spaces on the pews.

Can this death be undone? Can this people find new life? Can these bones live?

But this lack of hope—or is it faith?—reaches in from the dying gathering to the hearts of us who are called, ourselves, to die.

Such a place of apparent death holds up a mirror to us and asks, Have I been clinging to my own life, to the death of this place? Is the niche of power I carved out by finding my way to the vestry or diaconate, enabling me to maintain things here just as they were when they were so full of life—refusing to realize that clinging to the life of old is, itself, the source of the present death?

We create programs. We build a building. We find a place of influence. We offer an idea that sticks. We’ve birthed it. It is ours. It is us. It is me. So I will not give it up. I will not change.

I do not believe that God gives life to the dead.

I do not believe that those who find their life will lose it, but those who lose their lives for Christ’s sake, and the gospel, will save it.

If only life were so simply defined as “bodily life,” what an easy call that would be to follow. If only the life that I claim for myself weren’t in every word, or idea, or relationship, or place of influence.

But it is all these. And all of these must go with the body along the way of the cross.

Which is why the church must remember that it is still Easter. Our only hope, for thriving life as a people and as persons, is in the God who gives life to the dead and calls the things that are not into being.

Story Telling & Crisis

April 19, 2012 in Culture, Spirituality & Prayer with 4 Comments

This past quarter I had a student whose final project was about storytelling. Working at a Christian undergraduate institution, there was something of a culture in which a veneer of “nice” was masking shallowness and exclusion.

The stumbled upon solution? Storytelling night. Or, as they call it, “Yarning in the Round.” I forgive him for turning a noun into a verb.

Listening to his NPR-style documentary, the power of telling stories came through repeatedly. It’s funny–we look at the people around us and assume everyone else is “normal,” but then we exclude ourselves from that label.

We realize that our own stories are not stories of confidence and glory but rather of fumbling and shame and wounds all mixed up with moments of hope and beauty. But somehow we encounter other people and assume that their lives are the public moments of being put-together and beautiful that we happen to encounter–creating a content for the label “normal” that applies to no actual person that we have ever known with any depth.

Reframing normal. That’s what storytelling is about. It provides the rich, comforting revelation that my crap is, in fact, normal, and that there are fellow travelers through the mire. And, hope for moments of rest and peace and beauty.

My student’s project dovetails beautifully with a recent initiative of ReImagine in San Francisco.

About a month ago the stories were about spirituality and sexuality (you can read one by Anna Broadway and one by Dani Scoville [this one was subjected to heavy revision by the editor] on the SoJo blog). This week they were on Surviving Identity Crisis.

Of course, in order for you to feel the full power of the stories you’d have to… well… hear the story. But, despite that, here were a few take-aways that were rich for me:

  • We work with metaphors that create the wrong idea of what most of our lives will look like: we talk about climbing a ladder or being on a path. But most of us are, instead, enmeshed in stories. Not kids stories with a straight, single plot line. But real stories. Where people are diverted. Where quests fail. Where there is no going home and starting over. This is no “there and back again” children’s tale.
  • We tend to think about issues of identity, vocation, and career somewhat interchangeably. We need to get over this. There is an “I” who lives this life who can move from job to job, who can be, and respond, and love irrespective of other parts that are in place. (At least, in theory…)
  • It is a common, and often lifelong experience to wrestle with finding a way for our deepest longings and passions to coincide with the work we do on a daily basis (whether paid or not).

There were two particular pieces of wisdom from the night that I think will stay with me a long time.

  1. When making a decision, or discovering oneself to be in a time of transition, often it is more helpful to think in terms of a 5ish year block of time rather than “the rest of my life.” The reality is that very few of the courses we choose set us in one immovable place For.Ev.Ver.
  2. Richard Rohr told one of our storytellers that we spend the first 40 years of our lives building a tower, and then we come to the point where we have to decide if we’re going to be willing to trust God enough to jump off of it to live into what comes next. Yikes. But, importantly, this “tower” isn’t a tower simply built on success. It is the work of the successes and failures alike.

The stories held a great deal of “normalzing” power: they were stories of anxiety, of suffering, of rejection, of pain, of celebration, of hope, of hopes dashed, of insecure answers to the question “what do you do?,” of getting places but never arriving.

In that, there was creation of a new “normal”: it’s your normal. It’s my normal. There’s no “put together them” who stand over against “angst-ridden, disappointed me.”

Our lives are real stories–and good ones. Stories that are much too rich and complex to find resolution in one single dynamic such as job or marital status or recognition. Stories that, all too often, make it look like the only way to resurrection glory is the way of the cross.

Dungeons and Castles

April 17, 2012 in Culture, Spirituality & Prayer with 3 Comments

As folks who have been around here (or me) know, I get my spiritual direction from the Mountain Goats. And I need it. Today, as I get ready to tell my own story at a gathering about “Navigating the Crisis of Identity,” John Darnielle posted this on the band’s website (language warning on his post):

I love literally everything about my life and I have this probably-dumb-but-what-the-hell mystical sense that if even one small detail of my life had been changed, then everything would be different now, and who’s to say that the things most dear to me wouldn’t have to be traded away in the bargain?

***

If there’s any point to this story, and I’m not sure there is but, it’s that the songs I sing, which are often about finding ways to call a dark dungeon a glittering castle & really mean it, have some of their genesis in me being a fearful young kid with just enough presence of mind to turn to music as an escape.

That’s what I continually learn from the Mountain Goats.

I can tell you that resurrection glory only comes by way of the cross, but he knows how to mean it better than I do. I confess the sovereignty of the God at work in the world, but with a chastened confession that wants so many things to have gone differently.

In the middle of all that brooding and questioning, there’s often the sense that I know who I am, what I should be, what I should do. But here, too, life is a jumbled contradictory mess. Who is this “I” whose story of identity crisis will be told tonight? I’m not sure I’ve seen yet.

And the Mountain Goats remind me of that as well:

On Saying No

March 21, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Spirituality & Prayer with 4 Comments

When we say no to something that we normally say yes to, we create space to examine why it is that we would say yes.

When I’ve decided that, upon returning home from dropping the kids at school, I won’t make another cup of coffee or grab something to eat before heading down to the dungeon to work, it forces me to ask the question: Why do I actually want that cup of coffee and something sweet and bready right now?

I’m not eating because I want to be filled with food. I’m not drinking because I’m thirsty.

When we who instinctively say yes to all we’re asked to do force ourselves to say no, we come face-to-face with the fact that our “yes” is tied to our identity. We want people to like us, to approve of us.

We say no, and we’ve created the space to see that our yes isn’t simply the way it is–it is an indication of who I am.

We give up alcohol or chocolate for Lent, and we discover that “comfort food” is all too real: we’ve chosen numbness over peace, perhaps; or dumped pleasure into our holes of aching and longing.

Listening to people tell their stories about sex and spirituality last week, I heard that saying no to physical intimacy was a road toward self-understanding: how the physical longing for intimacy was tied to a deeper longing to connect with anther person.

Perhaps, upon saying no, we discover that the onions of Egypt are keeping us from discovery in the wilderness–discovery that people don’t live by bread alone; discovery that our God cares enough about God’s people to guide us through the wilderness and provide for us there. (Go get some counsel from Chuck DeGroat on this one. In fact, go buy the book.)

When I’m doing Lent well, my no is making me examine what my yes says about me–and what it says about me and God. I claim in word that what God has given me in Christ is more than sufficient.

But am I looking for more? Or, better, am I looking to less?

Post Script: I just discovered that saying No was on the Sarcastic Lutheran’s mind today as well. Take note, indeed!

Worship as Belief

January 22, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Spirituality & Prayer with 5 Comments

It falls to me to pick the worship songs for our house church.

This, as you might guess is something of a liability for me, and perhaps my group. I comb through the song sheets, looking in vain for “Praised Be Thou, Inaugurator of Participationist Eschatology” and the like.

So instead, I have to go with what we have.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Today, as I thumbed through and picked out a few things, I did so with a little bit of an internal eye roll. I grabbed a song that I knew was little more than a compilation of scripture verses. I knew it was a theologically and pastorally apt conjunction of scripture and real life.

But it wasn’t me. I wasn’t feeling it. I felt like a bit of a hypocrite singing first person singular lyrics about myself that didn’t reflect my reality, how I actually have responded to life as late.

You get it? I didn’t want much to do with the song. But I picked it anyway, inasmuch as “The Galatian Praise Song” is something I try to save for Lent.

But then…

When it actually came time to sing the song, I found myself able to sing it, to believe it, to celebrate the reality of what I was singing.

How do you think about worship?

Usually, I think of it as an attempt at an authentic response to God, reflective of where I was when I came in.

And that’s an important piece of it.

But there’s something else going on in worship as well. Worship becomes a tutor to our hearts. We sing what is true, even when we don’t believe it, or didn’t a few seconds before, in order to enter into the belief that we lack.

Worship isn’t just about experience, it is also about ultimate reality. Or, perhaps better, is about creating an experience that expresses and embodies–and therefore summons us into–the reality into which God has called us in Christ.

When we gather as one and with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we participate in the fulfillment of God’s covenant promises. We speak truth again, we catch a glimpse of reality.

And we can believe.

Spiritual Floundering in Seminary

December 16, 2011 in Academia, Church, Spirituality & Prayer with 35 Comments

The Duke Chronicle ran an article this past week on the struggles of Divinity School students. I confess, When I saw the title, “Students Flounder at Divinity School,” I was expecting something about the academic challenges being faced afresh by so many students who had pastoral ministry, rather than academics, as their vocation.

But I was wrong. (See? You didn’t think I could ever admit to such a thing–but there it is!)

The article was about the students’ perception that they were withering up spiritually. Their souls are being sucked dry by the intense academic environment that does not provide nourishment for the whole person.

I have a couple of responses to this, and would love to hear your take as well.

First, I have a great deal of sympathy for the students. I have known, far too often, the disappointment from experiencing a void in pastoral leadership in my own life. I can very much relate to the sense that I need more direction and pastoral care than I am receiving.

The students are right to be aware of this dynamic and it is good that they recognize the needs they have that aren’t being met. These feelings of not having spiritual needs met can create a great deal of frustration in a seminary environment where, if anything, there seems to be a plethora of wise, godly persons with pastoral inklings all around–none of whom are serving as your pastor.

My second, thought, however, is this: if you are going to be a pastor, you are embarking on a lifetime in which nobody is going to pastor you.

For the rest of your life, it will be your responsibility to find wise mentors to pastor and challenge you; for the rest of your life, and spiritual accountability and encouragement you receive from a peer group will come only from any group of your own making.

Is it good for div school students and pastors to be alone? No. And that is why, as a preparation for a lifetime of ministry, I encourage all such students and pastors to go out of your way to create the relationships you need for long term spiritual health.

It may very well be that the school should be doing a bit more for you than it currently is. But if this is the case, the best course of action you can take is probably not a campaign to change the system of the school, but one to change the relational systems in your own life so that they start helping prop you up for a lifetime of ministry that will otherwise likely unfold without anyone being in charge of pastoring you.

Abandoned by God

December 8, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Spirituality & Prayer with 16 Comments

“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

The stark cry of Jesus on the cross.

The cry of the man who ended up abandoned by God because he did exactly what God wanted him to do.

The cry of the man who had prayed to God for deliverance only to have his request denied.

The cry of untold others of us who find ourselves abandoned by God, not rescued from our trials, despite our prayers and, most disturbingly of all, in spite of our attempts to faithfully follow God in the world that is now the source of our death.

I had a conversation this week with someone who was living this: the experience of suffering, of rejection, the lure of death even, that stemmed from years of trying to be faithful only to have it fall apart.

The stories aren’t uncommon.

A young couple devotes themselves to the church community. They know that this is is the means God has ordained for their spiritual growth and health. The find themselves spiritually and emotionally abused.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

A professor at a Christian school or pastor of a particular church serve faithfully—with true fidelity to both God and their congregation, only to be run out because of politics, because of theology.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

A young couple diligently seeks the guidance of God before committing to engagement and marriage, commitedly works through their issues in therapy and counseling, continuing the relationship in the face of what appear to be insurmountable obstacles, relying on the Lord’s strength, only to end up divorced.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The bottom line is this: the feeling of abandonment by God is more severe the greater our conviction that what we’ve done, and the point where we’ve been abandoned, has been done in order to honor God, in what is true obedience to scripture combined with our personal sense of calling.

Here’s the point: any experience of emotional trauma can wreak havoc on your relationships, including your relationship with God. And, when the reason we were in the circumstance in the first place is not our own creative notion but a response to the calling of God, that relational dissonance is amplified incalculably.

In other words: don’t be surprised if your experience of / relationship with God takes a huge hit as you struggle with that rejection or suffering that comes from faithfulness.

As I talk with people who have gone through these things (including myself, to whom I speak more than I speak to most people), it often takes people years to begin experiencing again what they know to be true in their heads with respect to God’s continued presence, guidance, and even provision of new and better ways.

When Jesus was most faithful to God, he also experienced the profundity of abandonment.

Our calling to take up our cross and follow, as much as we might hope it will mean that Jesus experienced it so we won’t have to, often means the opposite: that we will recapitulate his experience in ourselves.

So what is faith for the people of God?

Continuing to trust that the God who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will raise us also with Jesus.

It is trusting that the suffering is not a sign of faithlessness from us, an indication that we were “out of God’s will.”

It is trusting, and praying, that we will yet praise the name of the Lord in the land of the living, among our brothers and sisters who will celebrate our deliverance along with us.

Everyman

December 3, 2011 in Brew, Culture, Food, Humor, Spirituality & Prayer with 11 Comments

Since my somewhat iconoclastic Trinity post from Thursday ruffled a feather or two, I figured that I would move into a post that has a little something for everyone today.

You see, at heart I want everyone to have something to grab onto that really works for them. And so, to celebrate this everyman spirit that I hope will define Storied Theology, here is a celebration of “something for everyone.”

First, for those of you with a sweet tooth, or who are theologically committed to the vision of a land flowing with honey, we have a celebration of mead:

Land Flowing with Milk and Honey Mead

But I realize that on the other side of the spectrum, many of you are simply not going to be happy with anything you can see through. In the slightest. But this doesn’t mean that your life is filled with bitterness, no matter how dark things might be. So for you, a celebration of chocolate oatmeal stout:

Man of the Cloth Choc-Oat-Chip Stout

Still others of you celebrate neither honey nor chocolate but rather the natural fruits of the earth. And so, with all its citrus overtones and the copper color of that is Americana, behold the celebration of the American Pale Ale:

Nipples of Mary Pale Ale

But I understand that still others need to remember that God is at the center of all things. In honor of the life devoted to God, we remember how our brethren in the abbey devoted themselves to cultivating the good gifts of the earth. And so, the Belgian Abbey style dopple red:

Stigmata Abbey Red

Bitterness and gall defines not a few of my loyal readers. And it would be remiss of me not to celebrate your place in the body as well. Wife put a heart on top to underscore that the heart is as bitter as the IPA:

Bitternes and Gall IPA

Finally, there are those of you whose high Christology is only going to be honored by a beer named after the eternal Logos himself. And so, the beer whose name we might imagine is so derived. Behold the Lager!

Not-So-Eternal Logos Lager

The point, as I hope you have noticed by now, is that at heart my desire is that we all find something to celebrate together. I realize that the body had many members, and all do not offer the same things, nor do all receive the same things. And so, a celebration of a little something for everyone. Let’s not bicker and argue.

But just in case these creations of mine have left you still wanting more, I have one other creation lying around the house that we can all enjoy, whatever we might drink alongside of it.

Stories End. Or Stop.

November 7, 2011 in blogging, Spirituality & Prayer with 8 Comments

I don’t know why I should bother posting blog entries anymore. This weekend I was linked by Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Beast, so it can only go downhill from here. But since Christianity is a faith built on the glory of the humble, I trust that the truly faithful among you will follow me on my slide from such heights of glory down to the pits of lowliness.

But all good stories are like this. They move. They encounter tensions. They resolve. Or they don’t.

I remember the angst of my heart when I first watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The great, climactic scene of the film, right when you know everything is about to be resolved, and the movie stops. It doesn’t end. It just stops.

The story is unsatisfying. We want to know what happened. We imagine what came next. We protest against the writers for stealing the most important part of the story from us.

People seem to have responded to Mark’s Gospel in the same way. The story doesn’t end. It simply stops. The lack of an ending was too much. Resolution was needed–so it was given.

Some might even say the same about the ending of Luke-Acts. Paul preaches the gospel in Rome with all openness, unhindered. Ok, so what then? We make up stories: about testifying before Caesar, about a release and subsequent journeys, about… well… anything that can make for a better ending than simply stopping.

But this very impulse to finish the story testifies to the genius of stopping rather than ending.

When a story ends, we can shut the book and walk away. We have completed our there-and-back-again tale. We know that happily ever after has descended.

But when it simply stops, we can’t let go so easily. We immediately scramble–first, perhaps, to protest, then to know what happens next.

To my mind, this is the genius of Mark. Some have maintained that the point of simply stopping is to send you back to the beginning. I’m not so sure. I think the point of not having an ending is to begin searching for the threads of how the narrative continues: past the fear and silence and into the present where we stand, now, as testaments to the fact that fear and silence were not the final word. The kingdom of God has grown up like a seed–on its own, the farmer knows not how.

And this, too, is the value we find in telling our stories to our friends. When we tell our stories to the people in our various communities, they can only stop. In this life, there is no truly resolve ending. To tell our stories is to invite someone along to help us see what will be next, to invite a participation in writing the future scenes.

From our hero’s meteoric rise to scrolling-by blog fame, to his descent back to the obscurity from which he came. And what will happen next?

Stay tuned.

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