Lenten Reflections Vol.2

Okay so I've been at this no coffee thing since Wednesday and I'm utterly confused as to the point of the whole thing. On the one hand, I'm pretty enthused that I haven't fallen off the wagon; especially considering I've been faced with some serious extenuating circumstances. On the other hand I've noticed two big ol' red flags to this endeavor: 1. Every single person I meet of the presbyterian dispostion (my own personal disposition) seems to think I'm either an idiot or legalist for doing this (including the very persuasive Rev. Tim Posey of Las Vegas) and 2. As far as I can tell I haven't learned a single thing. It's enough to drive a preacher to drink (which is not such a bad thing anyway). I'll probably be back on the java ina couple days, unless.......

Lenten Reflections Vol.1

Today is Ash Wednesday and all day long I've been bothered by my church's decision not to celebrate the Lenten Season. While it is certainly true that Lent is not mentioned in The Bible (or in the writings of the Apostles) the letters of St Athanasius circa 339 AD indicate that vritually all of Chrisendom was celebrating the festival by the early 4th Century AD. As John Westerhoff puts it; "Lent invites us to risk a journey through death to life, to enter a wilderness filled with danger, to enter the desert where both God and the evil one dwell. All too often the church has offered us only feasts without fasts, talk instead of silence, togetherness instead of solitude, satisfying tasks instead of suffering, a vacation trip instead of a wilderness pilgrimage. But each year at Lent we are invited to enter the desert, to embrace solitude and silence, to fast, to open ourselves to suffering, to listen for the voice of God in our restless spirits."
I wish I could say I've spent my day trying to figure how best to open myself to suffering but that would be a bold-faced lie. The only time suffering crosses my mind is when I'm trying to end it or avoid it. That all changed tonight. While hanging out at PJ's Coffee after youth group Alex asked me what I was giving up for Lent. When I didn't have an answer for him he hit me with the seven most devastating words that've probably ever come out of his mouth: "I think you should give up coffee."
Me. Without coffee. What's next? The Fonz with no leather jacket? Starsky without Hutch? Ferrante without Teicher? they know me at every Starbucks in the the tri-state area, for heaven's sake! My thoughts immeadiatly turned to the chapter in Girl Meets God (if you haven't read it RUN do not walk to your local bookstore and get it) where Lauren Winner is faced with a similar Lenten challenge (no books). She spends the next month alternatly sweating bullets and flat out breaking her vow. Honestly, if I make it a week with no coffee that'll be a miracle.I'm more ineteresting to see what God's up to through this little excersize (insomuch as He'll let me know). I had no idea this was even gonna happen so I have even less idea where it's gonna go. I do know that the whole "deny yourself" thing has its merits (much as I want to ignore them). Maybe I'll actually learn some of them this time. I doubt it.

The Mission Report

Short-term mission trips are weird animals. On the one hand, one of the worst mistakes the modern evangelical church has made is reducing missions to "we'll just go hammer nails for a couple of days up in Poverty Ridge, Arkansas and help those poor unfortunate folks out". This is NOT fulfilling the Great Comission of Matthew 28. The Biblical idea of missions is a state of mind, not a weekend trip. With this in mind, a weekend mission trip becomes a means to an end, not the end itself. The idea is to immerse a group of people in the problems of poverty, etc. in such a way as to transform hearts and minds and bring about mission mindedness (and if we can help somebody by hammering nails along the way, then all the better).

That was the idea we had in putting together our weekend in Birmingham. We set up our trip to work in a horribly impoverished area, stay the night in that area (on the floor, not in comfy beds) and then worhsip at an urban church that seems to understand that the Gospel is not just for white people from the Memphis suburbs. However, as practice rarely resembles theory, the reality of our trip was quite different than the plan. While Daniel Cason and his ministry to impoverished, elderly folks on the north side of Birmingham was nothing short of inspirational (as was worship at Red Mountain Church), the things that seemed to stick out were Guthrie's Chicken, New York Pizza, and Old Navy.

This bothered me for a minute until I remebered my RUF training: God is at work, it's up to us to figure out how and where and jump on board with whatever He's doing. Here's the thing: while I was so busy worrying about whether or not we "got" missions God was at work building deep, rich Gospel community in our group! God took my weekend about missions and turned it into a weekend of brothers and sisters stregnthening the bounds between the body of Christ! All of us have a weekend full of memories and closer relationships with one another as result of everything we did on this trip. Once again the God of the universe has humbled me and showed me exactly how foolish the best laid plans of mice and men can be. I'll let Him worry about planning the seeds of mission mindedness in our group. Right now I'm gonna sit back and enjoy the sweet community God is building among us.

“In those rare glimpses of Christ's own life of prayer which the Gospels vouchsafe to us, we always notice the perpetual reference to the unseen Father, so much more vividly present to him than anything that is seen.”
—Evelyn Underhill

Breathe (2 AM)

There was a brief period in my life when I deluded myself into thinking I could make a living as a singer-songwriter (of the country/folk variety). That little daliance is well behind me now and I'd have to say my finger is far from the proverbial pulse of popular music. On occasion, however, some great piece of music will somehow reach me under my rock. Today was such a day; as I drove to Republic Coffee to meet a friend I stumbled upon a song on the radio called Breathe (2 AM). Two lines into this song I had no choice but to pull the truck over and give the song my full attention. What I heard was a 20-year-old girl from California named Anna Nalick laying bare her heart in a song that resonated as powerfully as anything I've ever heard Bob Dylan do. Listening to this song made me understand that what theologians call general 'revelation' is true. All things cry out to the glory of God! I don't know whether or not Anna Nalick is a Christian (some of the things I read on her website gave me hope that she might be) but her lyrics and imagery demonstrate an understanding of life in a fallen world that I'll probably never achieve: "Cause you can't jump the track we're like cars on a cable and life's like an hourglass glued to the table/no one can find the rewind button" That's as good a sermon on God's Providence as I've ever heard. What really knocked me over came in the song's bridge:"There's a light at the end of this tunnel you shout 'cause you're just as far in as you'll ever be out/and these mistakes that you've made, you'll just make them again if you only try turning around". What a distillation of the Christian's condition. We live redeemed in a fallen world; faced with the twin realities that God's kingdom is both yet to come (the light at the end of the tunnel) and already here (hence our being just as far in as we ever were out)! Further, the more God uncovers the dirt in my life and shows me just how wretched I am the more I identify with "these mistakes that you've made, you'll just make them again if you only try turning around". The more I listen to this song (I downloaded it from her website as soon as I got home) the more I want to preach a sermon (or maybe a whole series) on the concepts in this song; but that's for another time. for now, I encourage anyone and everyone to take time to listen to a remarkable piece of music and art.

"To know this God, who both condescends to share all that we are and makes us share in all that He is in Jesus Christ, is to be lifted up in His Spirit to share in God's own self-knowing and self-loving until we are enabled to apprehend Him in some real measure in Himself beyond anything that we are capable of in ourselves. It is to be lifted out of ourselves, as it were, into God, until we know Him and love Him and enjoy Him in His eternal Reality as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in such a way that the Trinity enters into the fundamental fabric of our thinking of Him and constitutes the basic grammar of our worship and knowledge of the One God." Thomas F. Torrance

Take me back to prison

I was pleasantly surprised earlier to find out that Independant was in fact having a Sunday Evening Bible Study tonight so I went down to see it. Jean was preaching from Romans 6 and he used an illustration that (like so many of Jean's illustrations) stuck with me. He talked about a man in Florida who'd been released from prison after a long period of incarceration. He ended up walking into a convience store, stealing a six pack of beer, and then just sitting on the curb outside the store till the cops came to arrest him. While being taken to county lockup this man asked a police officer if his beer theft was a misdemeanor or a felony. When told he'd committed the former, the man remarked "I guess I'll have to committ a felony when I get out next time. Then maybe they'll send me home" Home! That's how this poor man viewed prison! He was so conditioned to a life of incarceration and confinement that he actively sought a return to the state pen! I immeadiatly thought of Brooks from The Shawshank Redemption who, upon his own release from prison, missed incarceration so much he ending up committing suicide.

When we hear stories like those they just don't seem to make sense. How could anybody prefer a life in prison to a life of freedom? Then it hit me: That's me in those stories. Not just me but every believer! You see, The Gospel of Jesus Christ has freed me from the prison of my sin. I can honestly sing with the hymnwriter Thomas Kelly "It is finished! All is over; Yes the cup of wraith is drained!" ......Yet I don't live like a free man. Sin to me dosen't feel like a prison from which I've been freed.....it feels like the "good stuff" my wet blanket of a God won't let me have. What's worse I think that's how most believers feel about sin. That's why we think things like "Well, maybe I'll just get drunk this one time" and "I don't have a boyfriend right now; might as well hook up with this guy tonight". When we think and do things like that we're asking to be let back in to the prison from which God freed us.

I don't think we want to be free from sin so much as we want to be free to sin. That is, we don't want to be released from the power and the effect of sin so we can live as we were meant to; we want the Atonement to function like a get out of jail free card so we can live like we want to. That's a frightening reality; but it's a really to which my life tesitfies on a daily basis. Praise God that His grace is big enough to overcome my will. Amen