Some Days Are Better Than Others

Yesterday was a highlight of my life. The church where I pastor had our first ARISE: an arts experience where we invited people from the church community to contribute original works of art. We asked them to submit art that was inspired by our latest sermon series so that the art would literally be a direct outflow from their interaction with what we learned over the last twelve weeks. So I am calling it responsive, congregational and to some degree collobarative art.

As usual there were a few naysayers who thought A. No one would submit anything or B. Those who did submit would contribute things that would barely qualify as art or C. With so many practical problems to worry about, focus on art is silly, an extravagance we can't afford or D. Churches shouldn't get off task and need to keep "preaching the Bible man." Well...I won't go into detail (as is my tradition) but the naysayers were so wrong on every count. A. We had 21 original works of art, B. The art submitted was all worthy of display and some of it staggeringly good, C. Everyone (who participated) saw it as a very practical way of interacting with and engaging our very Personal Creator and D. The Good News of life in Christ was on full display, in an equally powerful way to any sermon Jonathan Edwards could have ever preached.

There was original poetry and film, pastels and watercolor, stencil and one original song. All of it was on display in our first ever Sunday gallery and some of it (we only had so much time) was highlighted in the service itself. On a fatherly note, two of my kids submitted, so I was busting off my buttons with pride for what Christ is making through them.

Today I find myself so thankful to be a part of community that is open to exploring new things, discovering new freedom within the confines of what it means to be a church. I find myself grateful to those who stepped outside their personal safe places to risk exposing their new art to the world. I find myself amazed at the talent lying almost untapped within our group. I find myself renewed with new energy for new creation myself...finding new ways to say something great about God and this world He's given us.

This Song Moves Us

Occasionally as a worship leader/band director/pastor I see a song that really connects with our community. We try to only introduce songs that connect with people, and hopefully most of them do, but some songs (and I can never completely predict which ones) engage people at a very different level. Also instead of just making an impact on some of the community, some songs connect with the group at large and when you get a bunch of people singing together (which is why U2 concerts are so special) it's an amazing, unduplicatable (yes that's a word) feeling. "This Is Our God" by Hillsong Australia has been exactly that kind of song for the church where I pastor. It connects...it moves us...wanted to share it.

Why Then Matters- Part Two

I started two posts ago, looking at a question I have been compelled to. The question for me is "what comes next?" If you haven't read that post, take a look here, without it some of this might not make sense. Really, the one question becomes two for me:

1. What comes next? I mean, once we die, what happens then?
2. What about now? What about this world?

I mentioned that I would be journeying toward these questions, to begin with the help of a book by Bishop N.T. Wright (The Bishop of Durham) titled Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. And I promised that my next post would begin by analyzing and reflecting on chapter one "All Dressed up And No Place To Go?"

Bishop Wright begins the chapter by explaining the events that gave him impetus for the book. They are specific to him and many of us who are interested in this subject could make our own list. My list has some similarities to his A. September 11th caused me and many others to reflect on both of those questions...in fact for me most of my time responding to 911 was with regard to question number 2. B. Conversation with Christians has been the second reason I am interested, mostly because as I have mentioned before I think most of us just don't know what the "Christian" view of ressurection or the hope to come is. I mean I know there are many "Christian views" (something I know we will look at a few posts off) but most of them are probably wrong...I know most of the ones I hear (although I'm not always quite sure why, hence the need for a study) just don't seem quite right.

Recent Examples (direct from the mouths of non-new Christians :
1. "Well I'm not gonna worry to much about it, because it's all just gonna burn up anyway."
2. "I just can't wait until God takes us out of this place"
3. "I know he's ( a recently passed love one) watching down from Heaven and is happy."

Now don't force me to bring resolution to all of that now, but you know how sometimes you know somethings not right but you're not quite sure why? That's how I am on this subject right now. So Bishop Wright has his reasons for writing the book and I have my reasons for needing to read it. He gives a clue to why the book title is important that doubles as a preliminary look at how he will answer the question when he writes in chapter one, "What hope is there for communities that have lost their way, their way of life, their coherence, their hope?"

He restates the two questions he hopes the book will answer (this time restated a little more helpfully than before) as:
1. What is the ultimate Christian hope?
2. What hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities within the world in the present.

And then a preliminary answer to those questions is given that serves as a backbone to other answers that he will spend the rest of the book explaining. His answer to the two questions and really how he would answer my two questions is this: "As long as we see Christian hope in terms of "going to heaven", as a salvation that is essentially away from this world, the two questions are bound to appear as unrelated."

This right away gets to one of my severe problems with the standard thinking that most 3rd millennium American Christians have arrived at. If all we are doing is waiting to get out of here, then why does what were doing right now matter? Stated differently, why would God make me steward over a creation, over a world that he intended to destroy? I don't often think of God as a tricky guy, or someone moving the cups around to try to hide the ball underneath from me, but if we are just waiting to get out of here, isn't that a little bit what he's up to?

Bishop Wright joins me (actually I guess more accurately I'm joining him) in my concern but then gives a second clue to the theology he will develop. "But if the Christian hope is for God's new creation, for "new heavens and new earth" and if hope has already come to life in Jesus of Nazareth, then there is every reason to join the two questions together."

He is going to look at confusion in chapter one and two. The chapter two focus is on confusion in the church, among Christians, and the rest of chapter one is looking at confusion in our world- the wider world beyond our churches. I'll have to save the rest of chapter one for the next post, but why is making it clear that we are confused important? His statement is similar to my quandaries above, stated much more concisely and eloquently: "...most people, including most practicing Christians, are muddled and misguided on this topic, and this muddle produces quite serious mistakes in our thinking, our praying, our liturgies, our practice (see above), and perhaps particularly our mission in the world." Just like I said right?

I know from my days studying philosophy that many of histories greatest philosophers (Plato, Hegel etc.) have put the greatest importance on thinking straight about death, and the life that is beyond death, because it's the key to thinking clearly about everything else. So don't jump off board this thread yet, because "It's a matter of thinking straight about God and his purposes for the cosmos and about what God is doing right now, already, as a part of those purposes."

I just realized that at this rate I won't be to chapter two until 2013...I'll try to move a little faster next time.

Finally...some failure!

Today i stumbled across FailBlog.org, via Twitter via an article in Relevant Magazine. This was a hit for me today, either because I was happy to see people owning up to their crap for once, or because the abject failure of others makes me feel better about myself.

FailBlog is kind of the opposite of Successories...you know what that is right? Those are the supposed-to-be-inspiring pictures (usually of some guy hanging off a mountain or a sprinter breaking out of the blocks or when all else fails an eagle in flight) accompanied by a supposed-to-be-inspiring but usually aggravatingly insipid phrase of some sort. e.g. "Remember that it's the next pull that will bring you to the top" or "teamwork is the best kind of work because it's work done with a team" that sound like they are words flowing directly from Michael Scott's mouth. (I made both of those phrases up by the way in order to avoid a lawsuit from Successories Inc.)

A few of my favorites are a Ghanian marketing failure called Pee Cola. Or the "I Love London t-shirt screen-printed with an image of The Eiffel Tower. Or the tagger's spray-painted wall that reads "666: All Bow To Satin!"

It made me feel good to browse other people's failure because it's much easier for me to identify with these kind of things than it is stories of victory and conquer. I'm not saying I'm not inspired by those kinds of things..sometimes I need a little dose of Ziglar to kick my depressed butt back into gear (and sometimes I'm doing the kicking for some other loved one of mine.)

Today however it was nice to see a whole bunch of other humans falling down coming out of the blocks and making the most impossible but totally understandable blunders ever. Like this one...(here but for the grace of God go I)

Channel 9 news reports on housefire: Georgia man tries to clean cobwebs with blow torch.

Why Then Matters

For most of my Christian life I haven't worried to much about what happens next. In fact growing up the only real reflection I had on the subject was getting scared into salvation (it was all for the good though) at the tender age of seven or so by a fire-breathing, beating-the-pulpit with-a-belt, "you've got three minutes to come to this altar" preacher and then of course all the streets of gold hymns we did on Sunday. So my early thoughts/training on hell were "heck no, I don't wanna go" and on heaven "I've a home prepared where the saints abide, just over in the glory land."

Now as a pastor, I've fallen into a mode of theology on the subject of eschatology and eternal life, that I will call the "I'll worry about that later" method. A phrase commonly passed among preachers (and Christians in general it seems) is "don't worry about Heaven because heaven will take care of itself." Let's face it, thats the easiest way to take care of that sticky and difficult issue, because a surface reading of the scripture can leave one confused and more than willing to be reliant on folk-stories and what Grandma had to say on the subject than reality.

Unfortunately, I am being constantly bombarded by the impetus to get my act together and actually explore, assimilate and attempt to understand something about a subject that compared to others we spend time debating ad-nauseaum (like the right way to apply water to people in baptism or the "proper" way to partake of the Lord's Supper) might actually matter a whole lot. Most of the impeti (thats the plural of impetus that I just made up) that spur me on, are on one hand an almost complete apathy to the subject among most of the people of faith I converse with and on the other hand what I perceive to be a lot of really bad theology from most of the rest of those who actually may care a little bit. Honestly though I only "think" or have the opinion that their theology is bad since I admittedly have not studied or invested too much brain into the matter.

So...there are two questions weighing with me that I hope to explore via this blog, over the next 34 years or so (thats called a series with some weight):

1. What comes next? I mean, once we die, what happens then?
2. What about now? What about this world?

Because I greatly admire his work, I am going to begin this journey by exploring a book by Bishop N.T. Wright (The Bishop of Durham) titled Suprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Ressurection, and the Mission of the Church. Interestingly enough, its the perfect book to at least begin my journey (I'm sure this won't be the only one worth exploring) since the Bishop prefaces his book by stating the two questions that drove him to write on the topic.

1. What are we waiting for?
2. What are we going to do about it in the meantime?
(do those sound familiar?)

My belief going in (which I'm sure will be challenged along the way) is that this topic is of the upmost importance and relevance. Because among other things, what we believe about the future drastically effects the way we act, behave and live today.

I will attempt to post at least twice a week on the topic and will always lead with the same title amended with a part #. Hopefully it will be fun for at least three of you and that if interested you will invite others into the conversation to read, comment and journey along with us. I will look at chapter one of the aformentioned book titled "All dressed up and no place to go."

I Had No Idea!

Last night I went to small group. It's a group of people I meet with once a week from church...good people who are becoming friends. The group's not really all that small which makes me wonder why we call it "small group."

I was a little bit out of sorts going in, tired and missing my wife who had to stay home with our sick daughter. And then to top it off, I find out that the world as we know it is ending on December 21, 2012. I'm glad someone thought to mention it last night in passing because this is the first I had heard of it.

Just now as I was finishing my work day up, I remembered the impending demise of the earth and the humanity that inhabits it, and decided to do a little research. You know you can't just take everything you hear as gospel. When one's life and everyone and everything that one loves is at stake, it pays for one to check out the facts for oneself. But come to find out, sure enough, after just a little digging and finding the official website of the end of the world, death and destruction is indeed just thirteen hundred seventy nine days, nineteen hours, forty minutes and forty seconds away.

(Short disclaimer here: No matter when you read this post, the countdown predictor listed here will not be accurate, so please check out this link here to get an up to date, personalized and time-relevant prediction. In fact if you are reading this anytime after December 21, 2012, you are probably one of a few wealthy and forward thinking humans who managed to escape to Mars, sometime before the end of the age.)

My research revealed that indeed all of the predictors that I normally rely on so heavily all point to this date as the final date for homo-sapheonic activity:

• Ancient Mayan cyclical calendars- Check (Make sure you get the iPhone app Mayanical if you haven't already)
• Ancient Egyptians- Check ("Me and Tutuncommon seen this coming a long way back")
• NASA Prediction of increased sunspots and flares- Check

My only concern, cause for pause was there was no mention of the necessary "meteor the size of Texas." How does anyone (or anything) expect to pull off this kind of colossal disaster without that indispensable item? Well come to find out the world is not ending completely. Evidently...

"...a polar reversal will cause the north to become the south and the sun to rise in the west. Shattering earthquakes, massive tidal waves and simultaneous volcanic eruptions will follow. Nuclear reactors will melt, (YOU HAD TO SEE THAT ONE COMING) buildings will crumble, and a cloud of volcanic dust will block out the sun for 40 years. (40's a nice round biblical number) Only the prepared will survive, Geryl said, and not even all of them." Source ABC News: Christine Bower- July 3, 2008.

Now, I have a lot of preparing to do, so I'll sign off...I do have a few nagging thoughts as a father and pastor that I'll try to address in a post next week. But if you want to join me in getting started, let me give you a heads up...water purifiers, wheelbarrows, dust masks and vegetable seeds.

I'm That Kid

Last year I was sitting on the couch and my oldest son walked in...he's twelve and he was steaming. Now, he was trying to hide it from me, but one look and I knew something was going on. Me, "What's up dude?" Him, "Nothing." So I had to pry a little bit, but his soft-heart was no match for my super-advanced daddy skills. He broke pretty easy. "When we were at the park, someone hurt Reagan and I didn't get there in time to help him." Reagan is his youngest brother, my middle son, the ten year old. So after a few minutes trying to calm him down, I went to check on Reagan.

Sure enough, he was hurt. Evidently in a game of football a couple of guys decided to gang up on him at the park. Two guys from his school, that's directly across the street from the park. One of them held him, while the other pounded on him a little bit. The real pain he said came from "being bent over backwards...it really hurt my shoulder." I asked him who did it, and he told me his name. We prayed and talked about it and decided that our best course of action was just not to play with him anymore when an adult wasn't around. What he didn't know was the rage that was flowing through my veins.

Now every time I dropped Reagan off at school, I saw the lead bully. I wanted to get out of the car and smack him. Or at the very least, pull him to the side and give him a "if you ever do anything like that again, you'll be sorry" talk. I decided however to stick with the original plan the victim and I had decided on after prayer.

About a month after the incident, I took the kids to the park, and there was a game of kickball going on. Both the guys that hurt my guy were there. Reagan really wanted to play, and since I was there I let him. I sat their fuming as I watched that kid...and everything he did in the game reinforced what a little punk he was. He cheated..he bullied...he cursed..he pushed...he taunted. Finally I couldn't take anymore, and while he was pushing another kid off the base so he could tag him out, I yelled out, "c'mon leave him alone and play fair!"

I've thought about him a lot and it's been almost a year now.

This morning I dropped Reagan and Sheridan off and this punk kid was being dropped off in front of me. Immediately I was overwhelmed with the same emotions and then just when everything was almost back at the surface..as he was walking off, he turned back and waved to his mom. He smiled and said "I love you."

A like a flood I realized...that's exactly the way Reagan waves to me and his mom when we drop him off. And like a flood I realized...that's exactly the way I waved to my mom when she dropped me off. And then I remembered that I bullied and I taunted and I cheated and I cursed and I pushed. And then I remembered...

What Are the Questions?

Christians bug me sometimes. I love all of them (or I am trying to) of course but some of them just bug me. Mostly it's the ones that seem to have all the answers...to any question on God and God's world that one may have. I get the idea that they have got it all nailed down just so...and that's so different from my own experience that I just get...well, bugged.

My experience with God has not been one that has progressed toward confusion...that's not what I want to say, but I have found that God and the mystery of God is both something that doesn't necessarily clear up as my life with Him progresses and I don't want it too. God is not something to be "figured out" because we figure out things not people and God is a personal being. The beauty of God's mystery many times makes me long for more mystery rather than more clarity.

So I've been thinking a lot about objective truth (which I believe we can find) and mystery (which I believe we do not covet enough) and answers (which I believe we are too quick to give, to our detriment as Christians) and questions (which I believe many of us don't spend enough brain and spirit power ((for some of us read any)) reflecting upon.

So in the interest of encouraging an environment of healthy question-asking I'm thinking about some first-order questions (maybe later we can talk about the second and third order variety) that we should be asking:

I remember early on learning (in church I believe) about the basic questions that humans ask:

1. Who Am I
2. Why Am I Here

3. Where Am I going

Worthy questions for sure and a good place maybe to start...as I often say, "if you don't know where you are going, how will you know when you don't get there." Recently I stumbled across another set of questions, that are just a little better filled out, and for those inclined to reflect, might provide a better springboard. In their book Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith In a Culture of Displacement Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian J. Walsh, motivated by the topic of the importance of "home" list the following questions, and I have added some additional reflections to the questions. I love this set of questions because I believe it works both for followers of the Christian faith (like me) and equally well for those that are journeying without that faith as a base. I encourage all of us to practice the discipline of questioning.

1. Where are we? What is the nature of the world? Is this a safe or an insecure place? Is our life here a temporary way station in a larger cosmic process, or is this world and this life all we've got? Is this world experienced as home for human beings?

2. Who are we? What does it mean to be human? How do we relate to the "other." What makes for human flourishing and well-being? If humans are homemakers, what does fully human habitation look like?

3. What's wrong? How do we account for the brokenness of life, for evil, for anti-social behavior (as determined by one's worldview)? What is it that most profoundly renders us homeless?

4. What's the remedy? How do we find a path through brokenness, chaos, and insecurity so that life can be secure and whole again? Where and how might we find homecoming?

Ten years ago, I would have ripped off several confident paragraphs answering the above questions. Now I am reveling in the questions. Still confident that there are answers and that God is not trying to trick me but now also sure that I might not ever fully answer all of them.

God is good and "without controversy great is the mystery of Godliness."

Magnificent is Magnificent!

Three days after its release, U2's latest album No Line On The Horizon (NLOTH) has offered at least one track that is really propelling me forward. As soon as I heard track 2, "Magnificent" I knew it was a hit for my soul..and it came at just the right time.

Since it's basically a a dance-rock song, you can really move to it and Edge makes juice out of it with a whole lot of that classic U2 delay that my ears crave. Lyrically it's just a straight up praise song about the "magnificence" of God in the tradition of Psalm 66:1, Psalm 81:1 and Psalm 100:1 just to name a few. It shares one phrase in particular from all of those passages as Bono sings:
"I was born to sing for you / I didn't have a choice but to lift you up / And sing whatever song you wanted me to / I give you back my voice / From the womb my first cry, it was a joyful noise."

Whats the point the Psalmist and Bono seem to be making? God is so magnificent that Bono, Kevin, all of us can't help but sing for joy. Its a modern day doxology...its a dance-rock miracle and its a must listen.

Arise: An Art Experience

I am so flipping excited about the following:

On March 29th we are inviting the people of Northeast Community Church to submit original art of any kind to be displayed and integrated into our weekend worship experience that Sunday. ARISE: An Art Experience is at its core just a commission. It's us encouraging us to be what we are...creative beings.

As I watch my three kids regularly spout out and manufacture the most amazing ideas, I often wonder "why does that kind of genius dry up in most people as we age?" It seems like the only reason we get less creative as we grow older is that for many of us there is no stage or gallery for our art. I hope that ARISE will provide that place of display for the people of NECC.

Art and creativity should be a natural product of creative beings. If we believe (which I do the very tip of who I am) that we were created in the very image of God, and if I believe that God is the most creative person that has ever existed, then I must necessarily believe that I was born to create. So with ARISE we are really just encouraging people to "do what comes naturally to you." I firmly believe that some of our area's greatest artists are undiscovered and undercover. We don't know who they are, but we MUST find out. I hope that ARISE will be helpful in their discovery.

As a pastor I regularly hear things like, "I just can't stand my same-old-same-old life" or "it feels like my life has just become about merely putting one foot in front of the other." Yeah...I get that, but it's art and the beauty and energy that art produces in us that breaks us out of the routine into lives of exploration and REAL production. So if ARISE will enable at least a few people, who feel locked in the cycle of work and sleep followed by more work and sleep, to find the creative outlet they have been looking for, then it will have been wildly successful. Even more so if it becomes and inspiration for lifestyles for art and creativity.

I have always found that creativity gives birth to even more creativity, so my excitement is not just for the new art that will be on display on March 29th at West Rocks Middle School Auditorium in Norwalk, but even more for the beauty and art that will find its origin and inspiration in that day.