There is nothing more powerful than a story. If I’ve learned anything from the Bible, it is not only that God is up to something redemptive in creation and recreation, it is also that each of us are a part of that bigger story. The best preaching I hear is preaching that helps me see how my story is a part of God’s story. The best reading is the reading of stories that connect my story to God’s story. The same can be said of music, art and so on.
Not everything worth reading and not all music, etc., is overtly Christian. Yet, all truth is God’s truth. Every discovery of truth is a discovery of the greater Truth. I’ve never seen a conflict between faith and science; they are just two parallel roads leading to the same destination.
Nature, God’s physical creation, helps us see ourselves as part of the grander scheme of God’s story. I’ll never forget the first time I stood on the open midnight prairie of northern New Mexico and found myself awestruck by the stars where no artificial light interfered. I was all alone and no one was singing or preaching or teaching a Bible study but it was, indeed, one of the most spiritual moments I’ve ever had.
In every human story, if we will listen, we can hear something of the voice of God. Even in the greatest of all tragedies, God’s voice is never completely silenced. Indeed, there is solid evidence that suffering helps quell the artificial light of temporary sensory experience so that the stars of God’s eternity are able to shine through all the more, thereby giving us hope beyond the moment in which we are living.
For the next while in my blog, I want to just tell stories. In particular, I’m going to repeat stories that have been encouraging to me over the years, helping me find God and stay meaningfully connected to God’s purpose. If you’ve ever read my preaching, you may notice some of these stories as reruns. That’s because these are the stories that I find myself repeating over and over again in conversation.
That’s one of the main ways we came to have our Bible. People kept telling the old, old story until someone decided it might be a good idea to write it all down. It was such a big story it took centuries to get it done. I’m convinced that God is still revealing and is still writing the story. Maybe in ways we can’t imagine, God is letting us be one of the authors of one or two lines of the story that someone will read generations from now.
I hope you enjoy these stories, and find encouragement and hope in them as well.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Monday, July 14, 2008
Dignity
The new kid on the block shamed me, totally humiliated me. It was bad enough that the rest of us had lived and played there for years before this newcomer showed up. He was very athletic and good-looking and all the girls let him join the street gang free of the normal cost of at least one year in school together. None of the boys had the nerve to challenge his instant status. But, I did find some way of irritating him. His response was to call me down in front of all the people I’d known since second grade. I wouldn’t fight a kid I knew I couldn’t whip. I turned away from the laughing crowd and rode my bike home, totally shamed.
Shame is the robbing of someone’s dignity. That distinguishes it from discipline, an effort to instruct another person, or punishment, which is discipline to the extreme involving the withdrawal of some privilege or even the infliction of some form of pain. Shame involves the sheer stripping down of someone’s being for reasons that having nothing to do with hope. Parents who have had no good example in their own lives often result to shaming their children by thinking, falsely, that they are disciplining them. Shame is emotional torture to anyone on the receiving end.
Years ago, I observed a sad example of shame as discipline gone awry in another family. While playing with my sons on a local playground, another child was playing on a swing set nearby. The child did something that angered his mother. The mother shouted at the child, “Stupid!” As I watched, the boy changed his behavior for the moment. My heart broke for him, and for his mother. If that was or continued to be the standard way that mom chose to discipline her child, almost certainly, he grew up bearing a deep sense of emotional shame. The most important person in his world had stripped him of the simple dignity of being a person of inestimable wealth in her eyes. The sun in his spiritual universe had announced to him that he was out of orbit with the gravitational center of all that mattered. He was a shameful presence instead.
That may sound like an overreaction. But, in my experience, nearly every form of adult misbehavior is rooted in some form of unanswered shame from the past. Sin begets sin, shame begets shame. In its rawest, most unadulterated form, the gospel of Jesus is the only answer to shame. Sin may cause eternal death. Before eternal death, shame causes soul-mauling, heart-breaking, mind-numbing torture.
Feeling tortured, but keeping it to myself, I rode my bike back home. It was a summer day. Everyone sat outside back when there were only three black and white TV programs to watch inside. I pulled my knees up under my chin as a I parked myself on the front left fender of dad’s 1957 Ford two-door Fairlane. Dad knew something was wrong. He pulled himself up on the fender with me. No words were exchanged. In a moment, he slipped his arm around my shoulders and I began to cry. He never asked me what happened. He just wanted me to know that, in his eyes, I was of inestimable worth and no one, not even the block bully could change that. Through his beefy hands connected to my right shoulder, physical, emotional and spiritual refueled the empty tanks in my heart and soul with dignity and hope. My father was my friend; I knew I was loved. What else mattered.
The only remedy for shame is the presence in our lives of at least one other person who becomes the presence of Christ, the one who bore our shame on the cross, for us in moments of shame. The first person who ever did that for me was my dad. How about you?
Shame is the robbing of someone’s dignity. That distinguishes it from discipline, an effort to instruct another person, or punishment, which is discipline to the extreme involving the withdrawal of some privilege or even the infliction of some form of pain. Shame involves the sheer stripping down of someone’s being for reasons that having nothing to do with hope. Parents who have had no good example in their own lives often result to shaming their children by thinking, falsely, that they are disciplining them. Shame is emotional torture to anyone on the receiving end.
Years ago, I observed a sad example of shame as discipline gone awry in another family. While playing with my sons on a local playground, another child was playing on a swing set nearby. The child did something that angered his mother. The mother shouted at the child, “Stupid!” As I watched, the boy changed his behavior for the moment. My heart broke for him, and for his mother. If that was or continued to be the standard way that mom chose to discipline her child, almost certainly, he grew up bearing a deep sense of emotional shame. The most important person in his world had stripped him of the simple dignity of being a person of inestimable wealth in her eyes. The sun in his spiritual universe had announced to him that he was out of orbit with the gravitational center of all that mattered. He was a shameful presence instead.
That may sound like an overreaction. But, in my experience, nearly every form of adult misbehavior is rooted in some form of unanswered shame from the past. Sin begets sin, shame begets shame. In its rawest, most unadulterated form, the gospel of Jesus is the only answer to shame. Sin may cause eternal death. Before eternal death, shame causes soul-mauling, heart-breaking, mind-numbing torture.
Feeling tortured, but keeping it to myself, I rode my bike back home. It was a summer day. Everyone sat outside back when there were only three black and white TV programs to watch inside. I pulled my knees up under my chin as a I parked myself on the front left fender of dad’s 1957 Ford two-door Fairlane. Dad knew something was wrong. He pulled himself up on the fender with me. No words were exchanged. In a moment, he slipped his arm around my shoulders and I began to cry. He never asked me what happened. He just wanted me to know that, in his eyes, I was of inestimable worth and no one, not even the block bully could change that. Through his beefy hands connected to my right shoulder, physical, emotional and spiritual refueled the empty tanks in my heart and soul with dignity and hope. My father was my friend; I knew I was loved. What else mattered.
The only remedy for shame is the presence in our lives of at least one other person who becomes the presence of Christ, the one who bore our shame on the cross, for us in moments of shame. The first person who ever did that for me was my dad. How about you?
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Shame
Do you remember what it was like to come home from school when you’d just been beaten up on the playground? Or, maybe, when you got a little older, the first girl you had a crush on broke up with you and made fun of you to her friends in order to make it stick? Do you remember when they were picking teams and you were the one no one wanted on theirs? You may not remember the names of the people who shamed you but you never forget the feeling. (Anyone who can’t answer “yes” to at least one of these questions need not read further).
Do you remember what your parents said to comfort you? Things like, “Just because people say or do mean things to you doesn’t mean you deserve it.” Or, “When people treat you badly it says more about them than it does about you.” Or, and here’s the best one, “Jesus taught us to forgive those who hurt us.” Maybe so, but that was little comfort when I was still licking my wounds. I never could seem to find Jesus on the playground. My inability to immediately do what Jesus would do only added to my sense of shame. There is no deeper wound than the one shame inflicts. I’ve found that hasn’t changed with age.
It still hurts to lose. The playground has changed and the game counts for more but it still hurts to lose, to be rejected or to have someone say untrue things about you to others. Never more so than at church. Especially at church. The one place where everyone is supposed to play by the Jesus rules. Whatever nerve endings convey that kind of pain to our brains doesn’t dull like the nerves in other parts of our body just because we grow older. Shame, like most pain, is an equal opportunity provider of misery. Shame hurts spiritually, emotionally and even physically. I was still very young when I first felt the ends of my fingers aching like they were frostbitten, shooting electric bolts up my arms to the shame center of my brain anytime “I got my feelings hurt.”
There are remedies for shame, one in particular. I’ll get to that tomorrow. Today, I just wanted to ask if you remembered.
Do you remember what your parents said to comfort you? Things like, “Just because people say or do mean things to you doesn’t mean you deserve it.” Or, “When people treat you badly it says more about them than it does about you.” Or, and here’s the best one, “Jesus taught us to forgive those who hurt us.” Maybe so, but that was little comfort when I was still licking my wounds. I never could seem to find Jesus on the playground. My inability to immediately do what Jesus would do only added to my sense of shame. There is no deeper wound than the one shame inflicts. I’ve found that hasn’t changed with age.
It still hurts to lose. The playground has changed and the game counts for more but it still hurts to lose, to be rejected or to have someone say untrue things about you to others. Never more so than at church. Especially at church. The one place where everyone is supposed to play by the Jesus rules. Whatever nerve endings convey that kind of pain to our brains doesn’t dull like the nerves in other parts of our body just because we grow older. Shame, like most pain, is an equal opportunity provider of misery. Shame hurts spiritually, emotionally and even physically. I was still very young when I first felt the ends of my fingers aching like they were frostbitten, shooting electric bolts up my arms to the shame center of my brain anytime “I got my feelings hurt.”
There are remedies for shame, one in particular. I’ll get to that tomorrow. Today, I just wanted to ask if you remembered.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Dying
Dad used to edit his 8 mm home movies with a desktop reel to reel splicer. He’d view the developed reel a frame at a time, snip out the scenes he didn’t want to keep and then splice the two cut ends together. By the time he finished, we had another volume of family history, the editor’s cut.
That’s how I remember last summer. That’s because one year ago this very day I was dying. I didn’t know that because I was semi-comatose with tubes and hoses running out of every orifice. I don’t even remember getting hooked up. Nancy holds my memory of those days for me. The toxins from a dying liver and all the meds fried whatever part of my brain takes pictures, like a splicer on steroids.
The last day I recall with clarity was June 30, when we visited Gettysburg. On the reel of my memory, the next thirty days are pretty badly spliced up. Every now and then, I’ll ask Nancy to fill in some of the blanks my brain threw away. I’ve wondered if this is how Alzheimer’s victims must feel about their whole life.
One thing I do remember was coming face to face with my own mortality. I have snapshot memories of doctors and nurses working over me, talking about how sick I was, people praying. All the time, I could only look up at them from the bed, helpless to even participate in the conversation.
I’m still amazed at how quickly I got so sick, like as unto death. One day walking free, the next tethered to a bed. Thinking back on that week reminds me of the one thing I do remember learning for sure, a memory that stayed. However short or long our lives may be, they can end faster than an editor can snip a reel of film.
Whatever we intend to do, dream of doing, hope to do, we’d better get after it now. The worst thing we can ever do is allow ourselves to believe we’ve got tomorrow to get it done. This is the day the Lord has made for us to live the life he’s given us. We’re all dying. We just don’t know when the reel will come to an end.
That’s how I remember last summer. That’s because one year ago this very day I was dying. I didn’t know that because I was semi-comatose with tubes and hoses running out of every orifice. I don’t even remember getting hooked up. Nancy holds my memory of those days for me. The toxins from a dying liver and all the meds fried whatever part of my brain takes pictures, like a splicer on steroids.
The last day I recall with clarity was June 30, when we visited Gettysburg. On the reel of my memory, the next thirty days are pretty badly spliced up. Every now and then, I’ll ask Nancy to fill in some of the blanks my brain threw away. I’ve wondered if this is how Alzheimer’s victims must feel about their whole life.
One thing I do remember was coming face to face with my own mortality. I have snapshot memories of doctors and nurses working over me, talking about how sick I was, people praying. All the time, I could only look up at them from the bed, helpless to even participate in the conversation.
I’m still amazed at how quickly I got so sick, like as unto death. One day walking free, the next tethered to a bed. Thinking back on that week reminds me of the one thing I do remember learning for sure, a memory that stayed. However short or long our lives may be, they can end faster than an editor can snip a reel of film.
Whatever we intend to do, dream of doing, hope to do, we’d better get after it now. The worst thing we can ever do is allow ourselves to believe we’ve got tomorrow to get it done. This is the day the Lord has made for us to live the life he’s given us. We’re all dying. We just don’t know when the reel will come to an end.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Rest
Back in its TV days, I don’t recall watching one full episode of the nighttime soap, Dallas. The only soap that interested me was located just to the right of the faucet. Somewhere along the way, I did pick up one of J.R. Ewing’s more memorable sociopathic lines, “Once you give up integrity, the rest is a piece of cake.” That must depend on what you define as “the rest.”
A while back, someone asked me how my ministry was going. Almost without thinking, my knee-jerk answer was, “Once I give up my ego, the rest is a piece of cake.” My inquirer smiled knowingly then asked, “Isn’t that the way it is with all ‘the rest,’ too?”
She was right. Ministry, marriage, work, friendship, golf, you name it and all the rest, it all comes easier, once you get your ego out of the way. The only thing I ever tend to stumble over on the way to nearly anything meaningful or joyful is my own need to be in control, or to win, or to just be right all of the time. Once I give that up, the rest, the easier breathing, the deeper sleep, the more peaceful life, is a piece of cake.
Just before he lost his head over losing his heart to the Messiah’s call, John the Baptist spoke of a joy that comes only as a gift from heaven, once we give up our ego. “He must increase, I must decrease,” the martyr said.
He was right, the peace that so eludes us this side of heaven, the rest, the deep-breathing, soul soothing, heart-stilling, peace of God, is just the other side of letting go of the big ego. Once you give that up, the rest, the real rest, is a piece of cake, and it even tastes better at that.
A while back, someone asked me how my ministry was going. Almost without thinking, my knee-jerk answer was, “Once I give up my ego, the rest is a piece of cake.” My inquirer smiled knowingly then asked, “Isn’t that the way it is with all ‘the rest,’ too?”
She was right. Ministry, marriage, work, friendship, golf, you name it and all the rest, it all comes easier, once you get your ego out of the way. The only thing I ever tend to stumble over on the way to nearly anything meaningful or joyful is my own need to be in control, or to win, or to just be right all of the time. Once I give that up, the rest, the easier breathing, the deeper sleep, the more peaceful life, is a piece of cake.
Just before he lost his head over losing his heart to the Messiah’s call, John the Baptist spoke of a joy that comes only as a gift from heaven, once we give up our ego. “He must increase, I must decrease,” the martyr said.
He was right, the peace that so eludes us this side of heaven, the rest, the deep-breathing, soul soothing, heart-stilling, peace of God, is just the other side of letting go of the big ego. Once you give that up, the rest, the real rest, is a piece of cake, and it even tastes better at that.
Monday, July 7, 2008
god
A very wise man once said that a false god was anyone or anything other than God to whom we assigned the power to declare our worth to us. He was telling me this while I was going through a divorce a decade and a half ago. I was feeling so worthless because one person in this world decided that I wasn’t who she wanted to be married to anymore. Without knowing it, I had assigned that one person the power to declare my worth to me by whether or not she loved me, liked me, wanted to be with me, etc. It wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t applied for the job. Nonetheless, she had become, for me, a false god. That’s god with a little “g.”
God, capital “G,” is God by virtue of his Godness. God was from the beginning and will be after the end ends. No one appointed God to be God because there was no one there to appoint God. God, for mysterious reasons that outstrip our human capacities to rationalize, always has been.
God then, for mysterious reasons beyond our human capacity to rationalize, created us to experience his Godness, even share in it (made us in his image). We even get to look at all God has created and stand in awe of God (worship) and even use it to make a living and help others (stewardship). God’s very first warning to us was that we should exercise holy caution about letting anyone take God’s place in our lives. God told us of the dire consequences of worshipping at the feet of false gods because of their consistent tendency to destroy us instead of enliven us.
The rest is redemption history. Because we thought we knew better (pride), we did what God warned us not to do and God’s been trying to clean up the mess ever since. Adam and Eve took the first bite and we’ve been shopping at the same road side fruit stand ever since.
As false gods go, I’ve never had trouble with apples. Chicken fried steak and gravy, maybe, but not asparagus or broccoli. My biggest problem, though, has been with the church. Since before I can remember, that’s where I went to feel good, to feel worthy, to feel like I mattered (all exclusive rights of God, not god). When the church is your false god, getting rejected by a church (not the Church) feels like, well, being sentenced to hell. The most dangerous thing in any church is a pastor whose false god is the church.
Maybe this last year has been worth more than I realized. It’s made me realize I had a false god in my life that needs to be dethroned. The church is not God. It can be our false god, but only if we assign it that power. The church is not Jesus. The church, when it’s at its best, is nothing more than a group of people who are tired of shopping at roadside stands for what God alone can give (never sell) and who have gathered to stand in awe of God, therein discovering their reason for being and living out of that accordingly.
If all of this has been worth that one discovery, then all these years haven’t been wasted after all. Maybe I’m just now getting ready to truly worship and serve (and even laugh again).
God, capital “G,” is God by virtue of his Godness. God was from the beginning and will be after the end ends. No one appointed God to be God because there was no one there to appoint God. God, for mysterious reasons that outstrip our human capacities to rationalize, always has been.
God then, for mysterious reasons beyond our human capacity to rationalize, created us to experience his Godness, even share in it (made us in his image). We even get to look at all God has created and stand in awe of God (worship) and even use it to make a living and help others (stewardship). God’s very first warning to us was that we should exercise holy caution about letting anyone take God’s place in our lives. God told us of the dire consequences of worshipping at the feet of false gods because of their consistent tendency to destroy us instead of enliven us.
The rest is redemption history. Because we thought we knew better (pride), we did what God warned us not to do and God’s been trying to clean up the mess ever since. Adam and Eve took the first bite and we’ve been shopping at the same road side fruit stand ever since.
As false gods go, I’ve never had trouble with apples. Chicken fried steak and gravy, maybe, but not asparagus or broccoli. My biggest problem, though, has been with the church. Since before I can remember, that’s where I went to feel good, to feel worthy, to feel like I mattered (all exclusive rights of God, not god). When the church is your false god, getting rejected by a church (not the Church) feels like, well, being sentenced to hell. The most dangerous thing in any church is a pastor whose false god is the church.
Maybe this last year has been worth more than I realized. It’s made me realize I had a false god in my life that needs to be dethroned. The church is not God. It can be our false god, but only if we assign it that power. The church is not Jesus. The church, when it’s at its best, is nothing more than a group of people who are tired of shopping at roadside stands for what God alone can give (never sell) and who have gathered to stand in awe of God, therein discovering their reason for being and living out of that accordingly.
If all of this has been worth that one discovery, then all these years haven’t been wasted after all. Maybe I’m just now getting ready to truly worship and serve (and even laugh again).
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Buffet Believers
Not long before his tragic death, an interviewer asked John Kennedy, Jr. about his memories of his father. Kennedy told him that he wasn’t sure which memories were his and which ones had been given to him by others. Reporters loved taking pictures of what appeared to be the idyllic and beautiful Kennedy family. Since he was only four when his father was assassinated, John, Jr. had to put together a picture memory book in his mind made up mostly of pictures others had taken of his family. Kennedy said that he had only one memory of his father that he knew for sure was his own. The rest of his memory was borrowed from the pictures others took.
It has always concerned me, as a pastor, as a father and a friend, that the faith of so many people is not really their own. It’s a borrowed faith, cobbled together with the bits and pieces of the faith of others. Like they had walked through a spiritual all-you-can-eat buffet, loading their plates full with the bits and pieces of the faith of others that seemed palatable to them.
If you ask them what they believe about God, it’s hard for them to speak with clarity. They believe what they believe because their parents or grandparents or older siblings believed it. They didn’t believe what they did because they thought critically, but because they were willing to let others do their believing for them, as though that is possible.
I often chaffed under the ministerial collar others attempted to put on me by trying to live their faith vicariously through me, the hired hand. They enjoyed a glass of wine or a margarita, but, from the pulpit, they wanted their pastor to rail against the evils of drinking. They never shared their faith with others but expected the pastor to preach about the importance of being evangelistic. They expect their pastor to preach about forgiveness but rather enjoyed keeping score, sometimes for years, on those who had offended them. If the pastor said it, they considered it said by themselves, since they paid for the sermon. There is nothing more dangerous or fragile than a faith borrowed from someone else but never made your own. Living on borrowed faith is like expecting to lose weight because you watch your neighbor jog by every morning.
The Apostle Paul talked of the time he stopped thinking and speaking like a child and chose to become an adult. Becoming an adult biologically is something that just happens, whether we want it to or not. Becoming an adult spiritually is nothing less than a choice. It won’t happen until we decide to think critically about what we believe, no matter how threatening that may feel. Unquestioned faith is not faith, it’s just a bumper sticker looking for a place to ride. Unquestioned faith is not faith, it’s a conscience lazily surrendered to the latest folk-faith fad. Too many people these days have not one piece of their faith that is their own.
It’s never too late to choose to grow up.
It has always concerned me, as a pastor, as a father and a friend, that the faith of so many people is not really their own. It’s a borrowed faith, cobbled together with the bits and pieces of the faith of others. Like they had walked through a spiritual all-you-can-eat buffet, loading their plates full with the bits and pieces of the faith of others that seemed palatable to them.
If you ask them what they believe about God, it’s hard for them to speak with clarity. They believe what they believe because their parents or grandparents or older siblings believed it. They didn’t believe what they did because they thought critically, but because they were willing to let others do their believing for them, as though that is possible.
I often chaffed under the ministerial collar others attempted to put on me by trying to live their faith vicariously through me, the hired hand. They enjoyed a glass of wine or a margarita, but, from the pulpit, they wanted their pastor to rail against the evils of drinking. They never shared their faith with others but expected the pastor to preach about the importance of being evangelistic. They expect their pastor to preach about forgiveness but rather enjoyed keeping score, sometimes for years, on those who had offended them. If the pastor said it, they considered it said by themselves, since they paid for the sermon. There is nothing more dangerous or fragile than a faith borrowed from someone else but never made your own. Living on borrowed faith is like expecting to lose weight because you watch your neighbor jog by every morning.
The Apostle Paul talked of the time he stopped thinking and speaking like a child and chose to become an adult. Becoming an adult biologically is something that just happens, whether we want it to or not. Becoming an adult spiritually is nothing less than a choice. It won’t happen until we decide to think critically about what we believe, no matter how threatening that may feel. Unquestioned faith is not faith, it’s just a bumper sticker looking for a place to ride. Unquestioned faith is not faith, it’s a conscience lazily surrendered to the latest folk-faith fad. Too many people these days have not one piece of their faith that is their own.
It’s never too late to choose to grow up.
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