It Takes A Church...

The Word in Community

Today, at our church, a vigil will come to an end.  It is part of our "For Love of God and Neighbor Campaign".  It has been meant to be a week of spiritual discipline for anchoring our church's mission in the words of Scripture. It is the first time that we have done something like this, but I sense it won’t be the last. 

Last Sunday at the end of our last service of the morning, a elder in our church stood before the congregation and read aloud from Genesis 1:1-5, we then dismissed the service and a small group of junior high students and their young adult leaders sat in a circle and took up where the elder left off.  For the next five days, from early in the morning until late into the night, there has been someone reading, aloud, from the Chronological New Living Translation of the Bible as we as a church community work our way through the entire Bible.

Tonight, at 7 PM a group of leaders in our church will gather together to read the last chapter of Bible, Revelation 22.  We have asked four readers to lead us, with a child reading the penultimate verse and then in call and response fashion the leaders of our church will read the last verse together.

Five days, 1441 pages, 76 hours of reading and an amazing experience.

I was signed up to read with my wife early in the experience.  I assumed that I would only read once. My son, who had already read with the Junior Highers tagged along because he wanted to do it again. I listened as my wife read about Passover and the slaughter of the first born Egyptians because of Pharaoh’s stubbornness (with my own first born son listening on). Then I read the passage where because of Israel's own stubbornness (how quick we forget!) God had to punish them in the wilderness.

Throughout the day, I remembered that while I went about leading the church staff in meetings, preparing for events, meeting with people, there was someone reading the word of God aloud in our sanctuary.  It was like being in a musical, but the music was the voice of God through the voice of his people.  Tuesday afternoon, I snuck in the back of the sanctuary for a few minutes and listened as our church receptionist read all by herself, her friendly voice that greets people when they call the church, filling the sanctuary with the word of God.

Tuesday night after a Sanctuary Remodel Committee meeting,  I joined a group of young adults and a homeless women who were gathered reading about Solomon's building the temple. A long passage about so many details, it made me grateful for the committee that is paying attention to our sanctuary details, so that in the words of 1 Kings 8:60, "Then people all over the earth will know that the Lord is God and there is no other."

I left at 10:15, but the young adults carried on through the night, moving from the pithy wisdom of Proverbs through the blush-causing Song of Solomon and into the prophets.

On Wednesday morning my ten year old daughter Ali asked me to get her up early so that she could read before school.  We arrived at 6 AM where one of my colleagues was already in sanctuary.  From 4 AM - 6 AM he had walked alone circling the inside of sanctuary and reading the psalms of praise.  Then I listened as my daughter's sweet voice told of the sacrificial love of the Messiah from Isaiah.  She finished by reading Isaiah 59:21: "And this is my covenant with them," says the Lord. "My Spirit will not leave them and neither will these words that I have given you. They will be on your lips and on the lips of your children, and your children's children forever.  I, the Lord, have spoken."

This morning, I returned again.  At 4 AM I joined with a Marine dressed in his uniform who sat in the darkness under a huge picture of the Good Samaritan on our chancel with only the glow of the lights for reading illuminating the scene.  We read from the gospels (after so many hours we were finally in the New Testament!) taking turns for two hours until both daylight and the friendly face of a 70 year widow and elder in our church lit up the morning.  As we gave the scriptures to her, her Texas drawl added depth and warmth to the story.

I prepared to leave the vigil to her strong voice, so that I could see my kids off to school.  As I left the sanctuary I heard her reading the words of Jesus, “I have loved you even as the Father has loved me.  Remain in my love. When you obey my commandments, you remain in my love, just as I obey my Father’s commandments and remain in his love.”

I know that my Texan friend turned the Bible over to a retired lawyer who loves the Scriptures.  I smiled to think of his booming, confident voice taking up the task from her quiet confident drawl.  And throughout this day, more will read, more will listen.  A homeless woman has probably heard more of the Bible this past week than any of us.  A family brought their preschool aged boys just to listen and be part of something they really don’t understand.

We have needed the whole body of Christ to take on this task, we needed single adults who had the freedom to read late into the night, stay-at-home moms and retirees who could fill the working hours, children who could bring laughter as they giggled through trying to pronounce Hebrew names and working folk who would begin and end their days “in the world” with a time “in the Word” reminding us what all these writings are really about. 

Reading aloud the scriptures, listening to them they way they were read for centuries, in community, hearing the grand narrative of God’s redeeming love for the world, letting it soak into the life of our community as we seek to live out the “powerful play” that goes on. 

I feel sadness for those who missed out on this experience.  I feel some sadness about times I have missed out on what may have been equally powerful and meaningful because my life schedule didn't permit it.

But for those of us who have been part, and for our church as a whole, I can only imagine what this might do to us.

"When I discovered your words, I devoured them.  They are my joy and my heart's delight, for I bear your name, O Lord God."  (Jeremiah 15:16)

[Update: Sheryl France-Moran a reflection on the Scripture Vigil at her blog, too. ]

The Kingdom and Our Neighbor

“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’"  
           Matthew 22:36-39, what Scot McKnight has called "The Jesus Creed."

“The Kingdom is the society in which the Jesus Creed transforms life.”
Scot McKnight, Jesus Creed, 127.

"I kept steadily to meetings, spent First-day afternoons chiefly in reading the Scriptures and other good books, and was early convinced in my mind that true religion consisted in an inward life, wherein the heart does love and reverence God the Creator, and learns to exercise true justice and goodness, not only toward all men, but also toward the brute creation; that, as the mind was moved by an inward principle to love God as an invisible, incomprehensible Being, so, by the same principle, it was moved to love Him in all His manifestations in the visible world; that, as by His breath the flame of life was kindled in all animal sensible creatures, to say we love God as unseen, and at the same time exercise cruelty toward the least creature moving by His life, or by life derived from Him, was a contradiction in itself."
            John Woolman, Quaker leader and early abolitionist, 1720-1772.

Abba Anthony on Neighbors

'Our life and our death is with our neighbor. If we gain our brother, we have gained God, but if we scandalize our brother, we have sinned against Christ.' 
Abba Anthony, 4th Century

Sacrifice

"To sacrifice something is to make it holy by giving it away for love."

   Frederick Buechner

Our group...off and running for Africa

12 of the 28 members of the Marathoners for Malawi took off on our first training run and then had breakfast together.  After three months of getting organized, getting in shape and getting ready, we are now training together for the children of Africa.  More info here, but if you'd like to make a difference in a world that needs a difference made, please consider sponsoring us here.

Links Well Worth Looking At...

Mark D. Roberts has started a series on "The Mission of God and the Missional Church". 

Christianity Today is offering an email debate between atheist Christopher Hitchens and Theologian Douglas Wilson on "Is Christianity Good for the World?"   (Note to those following my "Jesus Creed" posts: The debate makes ample reference to the importance of the Good Samaritan Story in ethical reasoning.)

Closer to (my) home, another member of my church, Kimberly Campbell has started a new blog called Inspire.  An articulate and authentic young mom who has pretty recently begun the journey of walking with Jesus, Kim's blog is inspiring for the way it reveals the genuine gratitude of someone who has discovered grace, and the honest struggles with grasping that grace on days when it is not always apparent.  Please go by Kim's blog and leave a comment encouraging her on.  We need more voices like Kim's in the blogosphere.

And Jarhed Jon, a Marine and blogger who is also a member at SCPC offers this on what the prayers of God's people offered to him as he was deployed in Iraq this past year.

There are two things the prayers of God’s people provided: PERSPECTIVE and HOPE. The prayers of God’s people and the knowledge I had of them impressed upon me the fact that I was not ultimately serving the Marine Corps, God was using me in His service. My community in Christ reminded me that God is sovereign--not a military organization or any earthly power. Once my perspective was squared away, there was room for hope. The futility and fear of trusting in random luck, personal strength, military might or political policy was dispelled by the knowledge that people were praying for me and God was with me. I was reminded that God is involved in everything that happens to me. The prayers of His people impressed upon me the fact that God Himself is implementing His plan in the world--and I am a part of it; and so is everyone who prayed for me.

Jon recently reenlisted for another two years and faces another one year deployment to Iraq in January.

Healthy, Connected, and…Frail?

“A healthy church is one in which we seek to stay connected with God by seeking to connect others to God, one in which we 'win God' by converting one another, and convert one another by our truthful awareness of frailty.”

Rowan Williams, Where God Happens, 27.

Another snippet from a book on the Desert Fathers by Archbishop Rowan Williams has triggered another round of obsessing about the "Jesus Creed" of loving God and neighbor:  “Have I got this all backwards… again?”  Williams definition of a “healthy church” has the requisite “love God” and "love neighbor" that certainly squares with the core teaching of Jesus. 

But he offers a most challenging twist on the usual order.  Most of us say, “I’ll first love God and then look out to my neighbor.”  That is, that after I am “prayed up”, “spiritually centered”, have a great "experience" of worship, feel "inspired" and "connected" to God and have had my fill of the Lord’s Supper or the latest praise band, I will then take my spiritually-sated self out into the world and see what I can do.

But Archbishop Williams turns the statement on its head.  And then offers a most unexpected action step.

First, the “turn.” 
“A healthy church is one in which we seek to stay connected with God by seeking to connect others to God, one in which we “win God” by converting one another.”  In a church world that has been driven by creating environments where people can “connect with God”, the Desert Fathers, Williams said, realized that we find God primarily by connecting others to God.  That as we seek to reach out to others, share the presence of God with others and by our efforts bring God to others, we discover (or maybe better "recognize")  that God is already deeply present with us.  As we join the Spirit’s efforts to glorify (another word for “reveal” or “show”) God to those who have lost connection with God, we find, to our great amazement that we who are doing the connecting are experiencing the most undeniable sense of  God’s presence at work in and through our lives.  We “win God” by focusing on “winning the neighbor” to God.  (Now  doesn’t that feel all backward and out of order?)

Then, the unexpected action step. 

We “convert one another by our truthful awareness of frailty.”  Most of us think that if we are going to “convert” or “win” others to God then it will only come as we are “convincing”, “winning”, “attractive” and “strong” in faith and belief.  But Williams tells us that as the Desert Fathers fled to solitude, they discovered the depths of their own sin, their own immeasurable need for God, their own weakness, frailty and inability to truly love their neighbors (why else would they become recluses, no?).  And as they developed and shared a “truthful awareness of frailty”, they revealed the God they had found. 

This is a far cry from the way most of us go about “doing church”, “arguing for the faith”, “converting” or “convincing” others.  I thought about this last week with the passing of Jerry Falwell.  How much more “moral” would our country had become if there was a group of Christians who freely admitted that we are the “Immoral Majority”.  That is, that we are sinners, we are scared, we are prone to fight and bicker and judge and pull away and live alienated from each other and so we need desperately to pray for spiritual and political leaders who will--because they live with “truthful awareness of frailty”--do everything they can to work for a just, compassion and moral society.

As I sit with more and more people who are feeling disconnected from church and disconnected from God, I am a beginning to wonder if we have the whole thing backward. Maybe we’ll find God and a healthy church the more we “we seek to stay connected with God by seeking to connect others to God” through truthful awareness of frailty both in ourselves and in our world.

A Chinese Artist, An Egyptian Monk, a British Bishop and A Good Samaritan

This picture of the Good Samaritan by Chinese artist He Qi adorns our sanctuary walls during our series on "For Love of God and Neighbor".

At the same time, I have been learning new insights on love of neighbor from a most unlikely source, the Desert Fathers.

One quote applicable to the struggle of seeing the despised "Samaritan" as a neighbor and then a commentary that helps us make some sense of the incongruity of learning "love of neighbor" from a group of spiritual recluses...

"The Monk must die to his neighbor and never judge him in any way whatsoever."  Abba Poemen, 4th century Desert Father.

What is to be learned in the desert is clearly not some individual technique for communing with the divine but the business of becoming a means of reconciliation and healing for your neighbor. You 'flee' to the desert not to escape your neighbors but to grasp more fully what the neighbor is--the way of life for you, to the degree that you put yourself at their disposal in connecting them with God. (Archbishop Rowan Williams, Where God Happens, 33)

Who is the Neighbor you need?

In Luke 10:25-37, we have one of the most famous stories in human history. It is arguably, along with the parable of the prodigal son, the most famous parable of Jesus.  It has been told in innumerable Sunday School classes.  And indeed, the phrase “Good Samaritan” is now a label in our culture for anyone who lends a helping hand.  There is even a “Good Sam” club for RVers who are dedicated to helping those who need help along the road.  In other words, very few of Jesus’ stories are better known and have made a greater impact than this one. 

But is that the point of Jesus parable? 

Let’s state right up front that if all this story teaches us is that God wants people to help others in need, then this is a fine story, a really appropriate and good story and it is worthy of telling to our children and seeking to live out ourselves.  If the point of this parable is that we should be willing to do whatever we can to help others, even at great cost. (The Samaritan not only personally took care of the man who was robbed and beaten, but paid the equivalent of two days salary to do so.) Even if this is nothing more than a story about generous, sacrificial, tangible care for others, it is truly a great parable with an important and challenging point.

But then we’d miss the actual point that Jesus was making here.  And it is even more pointed.

Let’s look back at the actual interchange between the religious scholar and Jesus again.  The lawyer asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” 
Jesus asks him what he thinks the Bible says. 
The Lawyer responds by citing the same words that Jesus is telling people all over the country side: Love God, Love your neighbor.
Jesus tells him, Good, you got it.  Do that and you’ll get eternal life.

Then the religious scholar shows his hand. Luke writes, “But wanting to justify himself…”

That is, wanting to win the debate and put Jesus in his place, he asks a follow up question,“And who is my neighbor?"

The lawyer is asking Jesus, “So who do you say I have to care for in order for God to be pleased with me? Who do I love as a believer who has eternal life?  Who is in the club, Jesus? 

If Jesus answers the way most teachers of his day would have answered, he would have said, “And your neighbor, the true believers, the ones who are right with God and therefore, you must love like yourself are….” 

By now, everyone there would have caught the sub-text:  What group are you in, Jesus?  Who is right?  What camp has God’s blessing, in your opinion?  Who am I responsible for?  And who can I ignore because they are not worthy of my love, they are outside of God’s love, they are wrong, immoral, illegal, irreligious?  What do you say? 

But this is what we most often miss in this story: Jesus’ parable turns the question on its head.  Jesus doesn’t directly answer his question.  He reframes the entire question from a different perspective that highlights human solidarity, not ethnic and religious division.

“A man—a Jewish man—a Jewish man who is a lot like you—oh smarty pants lawyer...went up from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers.” 

Jesus’ famous parable begins with an interesting twist that most of us fail to see: Jesus puts the scholar in the position of the victim.  And doing so, makes Jesus agenda for changing the whole world more clear and more urgent. 

Jesus is saying that it is a waste of time and it makes the world a worse place if we spend our time trying to figure out if “they” are part of “us.’  Indeed, if we are to act like Jesus and live out the Kingdom of heaven, then we don’t even think in terms of “us” and “them.”  And even more, in a world where at any moment, anyone of us can be in need, we all need a neighbor. 

When all it takes is one corrupt CEO to wipe out retirement account, one tractor trailer on a freeway, one bad diagnosis, one act of terrorism, one stray bullet, one wrong turn into a bad part of town to wipe out all we know and love, we all have need and we are all a neighbor.

"Can you recognize the hated Samaritan as your neighbor?  If you can't, you just might be left for dead?"?  ( N. T. Wright)

(This is from last Sunday's Sermon, which you can listen to or download in its entirety here.)

The Jesus Creed: Love God, Love Neighbor

Today, I will start a new series of reflections based upon a concept taught by Scot McKnight that he calls "The Jesus Creed".  It follows a capital campaign theme for my church community and it will allow me to explore some of the missional and Kingdom themes as they are anchored in Jesus teaching in the gospels.

I still intend a few more thoughts on "American Idol" and on "Learning about learning from learning", so stay tuned.

Imagine if you will that you are standing in church and reciting the Apostles Creed in unison.  Like believers have done for centuries, you are speaking aloud that great old creed that stands as the synopsis of what a person has to believe and affirm in order to be a Christian.  Indeed, in many circles, this is the core essential doctrine that you must confess without your fingers crossed.  It is considered an essential.

Imagine that you are in your church all standing together, the words on in a screen in front of you and in one voice you declare, I believe in God the Father Almighty.  I believe in Jesus Christ his only son our Lord.  I believe in the Holy Spirit.  I believe in the Holy Catholic church…” there is succinct that it builds to a crescendo, “I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting!” and just when you are ready to add a hearty “Amen,” one more slide appears and says, “And that every person should tithe to the local church!”  or “That every Christian will share the good news with friends and neighbors.” Or “That every Christian will go on a mission trip.” 

What would you think?  You may even agree wholeheartedly with these statements, but something would seem seriously wrong, right?  I mean, these are good ideas, you think, but you don’t mess with the Creed.  You don't just add stuff to the “essentials of belief.”

But this is exactly what Jesus does. 

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together,  and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment.

I believe that at this moment, the face of the religious leaders would have been beaming in smiles.  The young rabbi knows his stuff, they would have been thinking.  He just quoted the beginning of the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4, the basic teaching, the core commandment, the closest thing to a “Creed” that the Jews had.  And it is worth pausing here to note that if Jesus would have stopped right here all would have probably been well with those Pharisees.  He would very likely have passed their test.  Indeed, I believe that if he would have stopped there, he might even have avoided crucifixion.

But he didn’t stop there.  With barely a breath he heads in to the rest of his answer.

And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (NRSV)

What?! The Pharisees would have been asking, shocked by what they have heard.  “What did he say?”  This may have been the issue that made the Pharisees turn on him.  This was very likely the very words that led to his ultimate crucifixion.  But why? Jesus didn’t just make up his own teaching here and.  He actually quotes from Leviticus.  It’s a biblical statement, a statement from the Torah.  So what could possibly be the problem?   

When Christians recite The Apostles’ Creed it is the same thing as when Jews recited the Shema.  And you don’t take good things, even really good things, and make them essential things.  Only what is essential must be essential.  And this is exactly what Jesus does.  He makes a really good thing, a really, really important thing, even a good and important biblical thing, an essential thing.  Something that is required of everyone who would be his followers.

And that changes everything.

Jesus says to them: It is not enough to love God.  It’s not enough to be spiritual.  It’s not enough to be religious, to go to church, to live for a higher power…That is good but it just doesn’t cut it. 

The end or goal of life, for Jesus, is to love God AND love others.  And they are equal in importance.  You cannot have one without the other.  You must, must, must have both. 

(if you'd like to hear the sermon from which this post was based go here and look up the sermon for May 5, 2007)