Round two.

There are two trends that I see in real life on a regular basis that hit a spot in my soul that goes "I don't feel so good..." First, I see on the internet, in the news and in my community that Christianity as a movement is despised. This is due to a number of factors. Our self-appointed spokespeople over the last six years aren't helping with their God-invoking rhetoric and actions that don't seem to line up with anything Jesus said (It's hard to make disciples of all nations when we're killing them instead so that we can enjoy our Grocery-Carrying-Hummers and Dog Bakeries in peace and safety).

And we have this political machine that villainizes the left and demonizes two not-so-black-and-white issues that are close to the hearts of millions of Americans. Regardless of your stance on those issues, I think we can, as mature adults, admit that no one should be surprised by people not wanting to be a part of what they perceive as a close-minded and hate-filled church. Our tactics haven't always come from a place of love, mercy and grace.

However, what bothers me more about the state of Christianity in America is that while we're actively hated as an institution, as individuals and local movements, we're often passively and casually dismissed with an "Oh, that's nice" attitude of those we're trying to reach.

My understanding is that our way of living is to be so counter-cultural that people will persecute us for our beliefs. I don't feel very persecuted though. I mostly feel ignored. And that bothers me.

What I don't want is for our Savior to be synonymous with hate and hypocrisy. What I do want is for the Gospel, words that are still radical today, to overwhelm the community I am a part of. So all I know to do in this conversation is to turn the light on me and ask:

How am I putting God's truth on display in my life?
How can I better live out this faith?
How can I, as one believer in a community of many believers, reclaim Jesus and be a movement for unquestionable good?

I feel like I'm saying things that not all of my friends agree with, so please, engage me in the comments. Do you see it a completely different way? I want your voice to be heard as well. I'm not here to debate but to talk about these things. The Body of Christ is supposed to be unified, but I feel split wide open by some of these topics, to the point where they feel taboo to even raise. But I think it's important to talk about this stuff. So, please, remember that we're called to love one another and then comment away.

Be blessed... be loved...

Labels: Favorites, Jesus

As I've pondered the James Cameron announcement (see the last post), I've come to the conclusion that we've got to think about our role in this mess. If the Church concentrated on making the world more like Heaven, if our number one goal was to end hunger, create shelter, provide heat and clothing, and then move into realms like education, health care and then into even broader arenas like human rights and creating equality, I think the world wouldn't be interested in spending time disproving Christianity. I imagine they'd celebrate the work of God on display.

But in the past couple years we've seen Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion plastered all over Barnes and Noble. We've seen the author of The Da Vinci Code publicly stating that it is a work of fiction, and then at least thousands of people exploring if it was true or not. We've had Oprah's The Secret speaking to thousands of people looking to fill a void in their life that God wants to fill so badly. Just as we are seeing a waning interest in The Da Vinci Code, all of these things will soon be forgotten and Jesus will still be capturing the hearts, minds and imaginations of millions of people around the world. But I think to dismiss all of what's happening without critically examining our role in it would be to do the Church a disservice.

It seems like people are fed up with Christianity in America. How did we get this far? Certainly we are to expect persecution, but this doesn't feel (at least to me) like a kingdom's power being threatened. This feels like people with good intentions wanting to make the world a more tolerable, more peaceful place, and the way they've deemed most efficient to accomplishing that end is to disprove Christianity.

And when I read the Book of Acts, all I can think is... "Huh?"

We're supposed to be a movement of people making disciples of all nations. We're supposed to be preaching good news to the poor, restoring sight to the blind. You know, proclaiming and demonstrating the Kingdom of God. Instead, we're running multi-million-dollar building campaigns and getting in bed with political parties.

Case in point: The following story is from USA Today on November 28 of last year:

The president-elect of the Christian Coalition of America has declined the job, saying the organization wouldn't let him expand its agenda beyond opposing abortion and gay marriage.

The Rev. Joel Hunter, who was scheduled to take over the socially conservative group in January from Roberta Combs, said he had hoped to focus on issues such as poverty and the environment.

"These are issues that Jesus would want us to care about," said Hunter, a senior pastor at Northland Church in Longwood, Fla.

Hunter announced his decision not to take the job during an organization board meeting Nov. 21. A statement issued by the group said Hunter left because of "differences in philosophy and vision." Hunter said he was not asked to leave.

"They pretty much said, 'These issues are fine, but they're not our issues, that's not our base,"' Hunter said.

I find myself asking questions like "Are we being good stewards of the faith?" And, "God has clearly blessed America... have we used that blessing in a way that glorifies Him?" Let's keep talking about this. I welcome your feedback, whether you agree or disagree with me. More soon...

Labels: Favorites, Jesus

This is my cop-out post. Rob Horning author of the Marginal Utility blog at PopMatters.com wrote an essay that's been marinading in my head for almost a year. The whole iSolation series was birthed in that essay. I've got tons of thoughts I want to get on paper and share with you, but every time I read his article, I can't figure out a way to say it better than him. So I'm going to share a piece of it today, and we can continue our discussion of the topic next week (we'll start with MySpace). It's a long essay, and I'm only posting half of it here. I might suggest that you copy and paste it into a document and print it out. It's long but it's worth your time. Read the whole essay at PopMatters.com.

Often during my subway trips I'll encounter someone who's wearing headphones and he — almost always a he — will be air drumming or dancing in his seat or mouthing the words or, in the most extreme cases, singing out loud… after a moment of thinking he's ridiculous, I'll start to develop a weird admiration for him. After all, here's someone who just doesn't care about looking like a fool; that's how passionate he is about the music he loves — which I generally imagine to be something like Rush or the Scorpions. This guy always seems entirely unembarrassed, comfortable in his skin with the reassurance of his favorite songs. He will generally have the satisfied look of someone who thinks he's been rather impressive. The onus is on those around him to be embarrassed for him, which is always an enormous waste of emotional energy.

In general, what this guy is doing is taking the prerogatives one normally has in the interior of one's own car — you can sing along to your radio and pretend you're the only person in the world inside your little bubble — and bringing it to public transportation. In fact, the gist of a lot of technology for personal use is to eliminate shared space and make every place private, one where you can control the environment. We travel through public space as though we are always in our own private car, even if we're only walking down the street with our hands-free Bluetooth earpiece in, jabbering away at 20 decibels about how we're not up to much, you know, just walking down the street.

Compare this guy with another person I sometimes see on the N train, only more often late at night. While the train is underground in Manhattan, she — typically a she, usually the same sort of woman who wears sunglasses even when the train's below ground — clutches her cell phone, gazing pensively at the screen, sometimes scrolling through information on the screen, who they know, who they've called. Perhaps they are contriving text messages to send, e.g., "on the train. bored." She seems to be using the phone as something to focus on. Maybe it helps with ignoring the creepy guys (like me, I guess) who might make eye contact with her, who will make her feel scrutinized and thus insecure.

A phone works better for this than a book, because a book reveals important information about oneself and almost invites conversation. ("What are you reading? Oh, I've read Da Vinci Code too. Can't wait for the movie. Have you read Digital Fortress?") A phone reveals next to nothing; a palm conceals it and its screen discloses details to the possessor alone. No one can ask you what you are doing, because the phone effectively sends the message that it's private, that you are checked out of the space you are in, and dreaming of being somewhere else.

As we come above ground in Queens, she'll immediately listen to messages or put in a call to someone she will likely be going home to in a matter of minutes, joining the collective murmuring of the inconsequential conversations that seem to take place on cell phones at every possible public moment. "Hey, I'm on the train." This comes across as an attempt to reject the world, or at least the reality of one's solitary presence in it, in favor of the illusion of constant companionship.

The phone, which makes it clear that one has people to contact in case of an emergency, people to summon for protection, works as a shield, as a seemingly concrete lifeline to safety, ready to pull you out of the unpleasant and possibly dangerous world of strangers. Extending the aura of privacy the phone generates, the familiar voice piping through the earpiece strengthens the cellular force field that obliterates the present space one actually occupies along with all the unpleasant or inconvenient people in it. Whereas the air drummer, in his flamboyance and his indifference to how he is perceived, sends the message, "You are not here", the cell-phone brandisher seems to send the message that "I'm not here".

These two figures typify the process by which public space is dissolved into a million private spaces delineated by headphones and cell phones and PDAs, under the presumption that it's both more convenient and safer to act as though the reality of shared public space was optional. True, it may be wrong to conflate the purgatorial way stations of public transportation with public space as it's usually idealized -- the N train is not a town square. And perhaps the behavior I've just described has an idealistic component to it in its refusal to recognize as public space any place that doesn't live up to the Platonic notion of it as a zone where people choose to come and linger and discuss contemporary issues: the mythic Habermasian coffeehouse where the bourgeois public sphere was born. But nevertheless, public transportation can still roughly serve as a laboratory where the effects technology is having on the way we conduct ourselves in public can be observed.

Though we typically use technology to blot out our surroundings, paradoxically enough, we often conduct this blotting out rather ostentatiously. For example, the air drummer, though he seems as if he has to have forgotten he is in public, is more likely actually searching for attention. What he explicitly refuses is not attention but interaction. (In this, he's like the cell-phone talker.) Generally, the entertainment we consume has habituated us to a division of the world into watchers and performers, a dichotomy that sheds notions of interaction, shared activity, communal action, all of which have been reconceived culturally as disruptive hassles. Both performing and watching have their perks: performers can be showered with attention and validation, no matter how banal their performance (c.f. the celebrity of reality-show participants); whereas spectators can hover godlike above the fray, lazily enjoying whatever spectacle they deign to notice among the many begging for their attention.

As a result, we find ourselves perpetually split between watching and doing; as a result we improvise ways to try to bridge the rift. The air drummer seeks spectators but presumably knows he has no real skill to warrant that attention, at least not on the subway. So he tries to garner our attention by taking his own spectatorship to the level of performance. He acts as though he's so convinced the music he's listening to is cool that it gives him a free pass to do whatever he wants, or what's more, the music he likes and the device he by which he listens to it are so cool that he must gesticulate wildly enough to call everyone's attention to how much he's able to enjoy it. That he looks like some kind of crazy mime to the rest of us who can't hear what he does is apparently immaterial. With so few ways to earn validation from peers or contribute to society, it's no surprise we have to resort to stunts like this.

Since we often regard our jobs as compulsory, something we'd love to shirk if we could (and an annoyance much like sharing public space), we can't seek social validation directly for what we spend much of our time doing. In the absence of any other socially validated work, taste and our ritual display of it must be considered as the only real meaningful social work we all perform. Because so much status resides in the signaling function of the consumer products we display, the most significant contribution we can make to the world around us is to build the prestige of brands. This is what it means to live in a consumer society. We can aspire to little more than being showroom dummies.

As Jürgen Habermas explains in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought) (MIT Press, 1991) public space went from being a realm of "rational-critical debate" to an arena of commercialized leisure. This destroys the possibility of a public identity independent of our private one: "Leisure behavior supplies the key to the floodlit privacy of the new sphere, to the externalization of what is declared to be the inner life." Our inner life is now the opposite of private; it consists of the collection of consumer and leisure choices we make in order to appear as something, as anything, in the devolved and oversaturated public sphere. Any expectations we have about being noticed outside the home are always in terms of our consumption choices, and typically these fleeting moments of notoriety are not on our own terms. We never know when someone will notice us, judge our clothes, our face, who we're with, how we're acting. The air drummer, at least, taking matters into his own hands, sought out his moment.

The rest of us instead tend to be defensive, like the cell-phone brandisher, trying to deflect attention, or meet some minimal standard so as to pass anonymously, while wondering at the same time how come no one notices us. The problem is the anonymity we aspire to for safety makes us in a larger sense disposable, interchangeable -- which is itself dangerous in a capitalist economy that's most profitable when it can treat individuals the same way, and give them no security or stability. (This is sometimes called "creative destruction".)

Thus, one of the cell phone's security-blanket functions, above and beyond giving us access to emergency services and friends is the psychological reminder that though we might seem lost in the crowd, we could at any moment be selected for attention in the form of our ringtone (which ideally we will have carefully selected to be au courant). The cell phone seems to provide a means by which we can control how and when we will be singled out and noticed, a comfort that conceals the fact that it is essentially a tracking device that allows our movements to be constantly surveilled. But rather than suspect the phone has undermined our privacy, we feel as though it has secured it, giving us a chance to carry our private worlds with us.

Labels: Favorites, Jesus

In some circles, the season of Lent is called "Bright Sadness". Over the next forty days, thousands of Christians around the world will spend time meditating on their mortality, their sin and their walk with God. My understanding is that the season was originally for new converts to prepare for their baptism on Easter Sunday, and later for the entire church to be a part of. Lent involved prayer, fasting and alms giving as penance for our sins.

Even as a a symbolic act, I don't think penance helps us draw nearer to our Creator, mostly because I think it gets peoples' wires crossed about what happened on the Cross. But I do see a great amount of power in the liturgy of Lent. So I'm entering into the next forty days as a season of contemplation on repentance and my place in the Kingdom of God. This will include more intentional times of prayer, fasting and alms giving. I expect it to be a deeply personal time between God and I, but I hope to share pieces of it on my blog throughout the season.

Today is Ash Wednesday, when many people will go to their respective churches and put ashes and oil on their heads, signifying repentance. They will hear a clergyman say "Remember, man, that you are dust and unto dust you shall return." In the past, I've rejected these practices for what I've perceived as negative consequences they create in people I care about. I'm still not completely satisfied with some of that, but this year I want to embrace Lent and harness the potential it have for drawing us deeper into a relationship with God.

For my friends at the Evanston Vineyard, remember that the sanctuary is open most of the day today, ending at nine this evening. It's a beautiful opportunity to have a quiet and familiar place for reflection and prayer as we enter into this season. And you can help out at The Harvest before or after your time. I hope to see you there!

Labels: Jesus

As far as war movies go, Letters From Iwo Jima is amongst the best. Given the outcome of the battle, the audience is invited to see the movie through a different lens than most war movies. All of the main characters were well developed, and the ultimate message that "the enemy" is not the propaganda-fed monster void of morals, but in fact, people just like us, with mothers and homes and conflicted inner voices.

War movies always bring me back to the God-questions. The God of the Hebrew Scriptures commands the Israelites to completely destroy a group of people - including, explicitly, women and children - with alarming regularity. Given the sinful nature of the Israelites, the nation of people God triumphs as His own, it's hard for me to reconcile these acts with the God Jesus introduces us to. And of course, they're the same God, but my head swims in it and before too long I'm just barely treading water.

When Jesus says "Go and make disciples of all nations" it's hard to picture Him in David's shoes, wiping out entire nations with His sword. Of course, if I read Revelations, it's clear that the God of the Gospels and the God of the Hebrew Scriptures have something in common.

These types of questions take me in difficult directions, ones seemingly dangerous to my faith. Of course, I believe that it's necessary to struggle with those types of questions if you want your faith to hold up under the pressures of life. I know this much - I'm not looking for a way out. There's no answer that would make me feel that Jesus' Way isn't the best possible way to live my life. There's nothing in these questions that would make me reject my faith in God, simply because what I've seen with my eyes and heard with my ears is the ultimate trump card. And yet, there's a part of me that desperately wants to accept fully the God of the Israelites, so I will turn into the questions rather than ignoring them.

So, friends, how have you dealt with this age-old question? I assume no one has a satisfying answer or else it'd be one of the first things you were taught in Sunday school ("Welcome to Christianity, and when you get to Judges, keep this in mind..."), but I'm sure that at least a few of you have struggled with these questions and I want to learn from you experiences and wisdom. Comments are open to everyone.

Labels: Jesus

Chicago's week was marked by bitter coldness, many inches of snow, wind in excess of 25 miles per hour, frozen pipes, not enough shelters and at least one homeless man reported dead from the cold. This seems like as good a time as any to introduce my Friday series.

I've been reading studies trying to get my head around the realities of my community. There's a lot of information out there and I don't want to overwhelm everyone, so we'll bite off a little bit at a time. I think education should lead to action, just as Bible study should lead to application and not just knowledge. Therefore, I hope to also feature ways we can help.

Today, let's just look at some numbers. I'd love to hear your reactions and any ways you know of helping make Chicago more like Heaven in the comments.

2005 Census Data (Poverty)
link: Heartland Alliance

• Living in poverty: 573, 486
• Rate of Chicago households receiving food assistance: 12.9%
• Extreme poverty (annual income less than $8,045 for a family of three): 261,780 - 9.7%

2006 Chicago Coalition for the Homeless Study (Homelessness)
link: 2006 Study

• 73,656 homeless in Chicago
• 19,477 were served in shelter
• 54,179 living on the streets, doubled-up, in cars, in abandoned buildings or in some other location that was not a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence

• 21,078 homeless on a typical night in Chicago
• 4,654 were served in shelters and 16,424 did not access shelters

2005 Chicago Coalition for the Homeless - Lack of Affordable Housing
link: 2005 Report

National:

• In the U.S., nearly a third of all households spend 30% or more of their income on housing, and 13% spend 50% or more
• About 6.1 households live in overcrowded conditions
• There is not a single jurisdiction in the country where a person working full time earning the prevailing minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment

Chicago:

• In most Chicago communities in the 1990s, rents rose faster than incomes despite the fact that, on the whole, Chicago’s median income rose faster than rent.
• Nearly one-third of Chicago renters were paying more than 35 percent of their income for housing in 2000; another 20 percent were paying more than half.
• Compared to 10 other major U.S. cities, Chicago had the lowest percentage increase (8 percent) in rental units between 1970 and 2000, which is less than half of the next lowest ranking city, New York (19 percent).
• The wait for Section 8 vouchers in Chicago is 84 months. The waiting list for housing choice vouchers has been closed in Chicago since 1997 and is not expected to open again until 2005 at the earliest.
• In Chicago, only 10 percent of affordable-housing need is met.
• Nearly half of Illinois residents earn $25,000 a year or less.
• According to the 2001 Illinois self-sufficiency standard, a family of one adult and two children would need to earn $38,281 a year to pay for all their living expenses without any government assistance. (Living expenses include housing, childcare, food, transportation, healthcare, etc.)
• According to a recent study conducted by local universities, 75 percent of the city’s working-poor families earned less than $13,001, the income required to support a one-person family above 150 percent of the poverty line.

We'll look at more next week.

Labels: Jesus

Being alive is not meant to be a solo gig; God created people to be relational. Yet, as technology advances and becomes more integrated in the name of making our lives “better”, there are trends that move us away from community.

The iPod has made it socially celebrated that someone walks around with a pair of headphones on all day. I ride a train to and from work each day with the same group of people, and none of us have ever said a word besides "excuse me" to each other. We do everything we can to be quiet and look forward. Read a book, play on your computer, listen to your music.

People go to clubs where the music is too loud to promote conversations, and even in a group, everyone is isolated. Television and the internet are too often the bulk of our non-working lives, and even as we are more connected globally, our community vanishes. I don’t even have to leave my house to rent a movie anymore. Online, people join communities like Second Life or they play games like World of Warcraft, where communities become a series of playing pretend. That’s fine in doses, but for millions of Americans, it’s a primary means of connection. Food comes to us, delivery style. At my gym, each new treadmill has its own television – we don’t even have to watch TV together anymore.

Our personal universe gets more isolated. Cell phones allow you to take your world with you, enabling you to remain at the center of your universe at all times and isolating yourself from the world around you. There’s an add on TV now where you choose your top five friends for the sake of cheaper calling. Rarely do friendrankings add to a sense of brotherhood – ask anyone who has had to choose a wedding party. Scot McKnight raised concerns about jogging with headphones and not taking in the sounds of the world.

Technology does present new forms of community – online groups for anything under the sun, Facebook, MySpace, online dating, instant messaging with video, international and domestic long distance calling made cheap, and communities like Second Life.

But even here we move towards isolation. I read that today’s youth assume that their lives will be public anyway, so they take the first step and put themselves on a community like MySpace where they give everyone in the world access to their lives. It’s the spiritual cousin of being a celebrity – your life as a product for others to consume. But celebrities seem to be amongst the most isolated people on the planet, with so few relationships that revolve around their humanity and so many that revolve around their success.

Community isn’t just about companionship, it is also about being known. Not being known deeply is lonely.

If I go to work and sit in my cubicle all day, toss my headphones on, get on a train, go home, turn on my television and fall asleep, how many days in a row can I do that before I start to lose touch with an essential part of being alive?

Or if all of my friendships remain at a surface level, and I use my blog or profile as the way I let people in, am I known?

My iPod keeps me out of conversation with God, too. It's frigid right now, and the cold made it necessary to cover my ears with something more substantial than headphones. And as I walked to work in the freezing cold, I found myself in a meaningful and life-giving conversation with my Creator that fueled an entire day of goodness, insight and clarity. It occurred to me that this isn’t a daily experience for me, even though it could be. My choice.

So is technology creating isolation, or is technology simply meeting a consumer demand to be more isolated?

The implications run deep. More soon.

Labels: Favorites, Jesus

Whiteboard Therapy: Wherein together we create an online Bible study in the comments section. All are welcome, no comment or question is too simple or too complex or even too out there. We can work out our faith together as a community, with permission to change your mind, erase and start over like a whiteboard.

"Lord, your dear friend is very sick."
I'm having trouble finishing up the Lazarus series. I've sat with the first sixteen verses for months now and I still have questions whose answers aren't revealing themselves. Help me put myself into this story and apply it to my own healing situations. Let's do part of it this week and finish up next week:

A man named Lazarus was sick. He lived in Bethany with his sisters, Mary and Martha. This is the Mary who later poured the expensive perfume on the Lord’s feet and wiped them with her hair. Her brother, Lazarus, was sick. So the two sisters sent a message to Jesus telling him, “Lord, your dear friend is very sick.”

But when Jesus heard about it he said, “Lazarus’s sickness will not end in death. No, it happened for the glory of God so that the Son of God will receive glory from this.” So although Jesus loved Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, he stayed where he was for the next two days. Finally, he said to his disciples, “Let’s go back to Judea.”

- John 11:1-7

Background Information:
I think the settings of the Lazarus story are important to understanding what happened. I'm not great with Bible geography, so if I get any of this wrong, please feel free to correct me in the comments.

At the beginning of John 12, Jesus has fled from Jerusalem and Bethany where the Pharisees tried to capture him again. These were places where Jesus has been putting His life in danger to announce the Kingdom. They flee to a place in Perea, probably Aenon, where Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist. This is a place of refuge for Jesus, for the whole town loves Him and John, and Jesus and His disciples get a chance to have a reprieve from the dangers they encountered elsewhere.

But Lazarus and his sisters are from Bethany, the scene of the Olivet Discourse (the Beatitudes, etc), a village two miles from Jerusalem. It is Jesus' final stop before entering Jerusalem, in the province of Judea, ultimately the scene of His Crucifixion. And from what I can tell its the last place Jesus was before fleeing to Perea.

Questions to get us started:
Why did Jesus choose to stay and let Lazarus die?
Or, the same question a different way: Why didn't Jesus choose to go and heal Lazarus immediately?
Is there something unique about this situation that makes it for God's glory to be revealed, or could it apply to many/most sicknesses, even today?
Since Jesus ultimately responds to the sisters' call, is Jesus refusing to work on someone else's timetable, and taking the time He and His disciples need to recharge instead of rushing to help? Does Jesus need to recharge? How does all of this tie into the life Jesus invites us into?
Where are we in this story?
What does the story tell us about Jesus?
Does anything in this story relate to our physical or emotional healing?
After Lazarus rose from the dead, he ate, or 'reclined' with Jesus. How do you think he felt about the whole situation? Depending on your answer, how does that reflect how you feel about the situation?

I'm sure you all have great answers and even better questions. I'll post any questions you ask up here, and the comments are open to anyone, anonymous or not.

Click here to comment.

Labels: Jesus

Matthew 6:25-34:

“That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life—whether you have enough food and drink, or enough clothes to wear. Isn’t life more than food, and your body more than clothing? Look at the birds. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns, for your heavenly Father feeds them. And aren’t you far more valuable to him than they are? Can all your worries add a single moment to your life?

“And why worry about your clothing? Look at the lilies of the field and how they grow. They don’t work or make their clothing, yet Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautifully as they are. And if God cares so wonderfully for wildflowers that are here today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, he will certainly care for you. Why do you have so little faith?

“So don’t worry about these things, saying, ‘What will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear?’ These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your heavenly Father already knows all your needs. Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.

“So don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

"Yeah, but you're Jesus"
I read this stuff and I can't help but think "That's easy for you to say - you only had three years to live!" and then I grumble about not being able to blow thousands of dollars on a 58-inch widescreen plasma TV without a guilty conscience. But as I've thought about that time span - three years - I realized that not only did Jesus live this way, but His disciples did too, only they didn't know their fate from day one. After His resurrection, they threw caution to the wind, commonly putting themselves in dangerous situations in order to spread the message of Jesus. According to Church history, all of the apostles but John died a martyr's death, often gruesome, and John only avoided this fate because when they boiled him in oil, he miraculously survived so they sent him into exile on the Island of Patmos where he had his Revelations).

I think that when you live as if you could die tomorrow, all of these things - clothes, food, money - they just sort of fade into the background. They're unnecessary because, like Jesus, your mission is defining your choices - demonstrate and proclaim the Kingdom of God and try to ensure the message will continue to spread after you're gone - and all of those things are sort of irrelevant to that aim.

I wonder if the message has become so neutered and the lifestyle so safe, that we simply aren't living the way the Apostles did, which forces me to ask the questions:

Should we be?
Is that what Jesus intended?
What does this have to do with the abundant life Jesus came to give?
What does a life devastated by the Gospel look like?

How do I live it in a neighborhood in Chicago?
This isn't a call to go put your life in harm's way, but instead a call to proclaim and demonstrate with abandon. To let Jesus be the Lord of your life in a meaningful way. To not just not worry about where your food and clothes will come from, but to have an entire lifestyle that makes those choices irrelevant. How can we simplify our lives? What small things could we do right now that would change our priorities? Maybe it's a simple as getting involved in The Harvest or the refugee ministries at the Evanston Vineyard, or the equivalent at your churches. Maybe it's working with kids who don't have a dad around, or giving up your Friday night so that a single Mom can have her's back. Or perhaps it's as simple as diving so deep into your community that your first instinct is "What can I sell, what can I give, how can I help so that we can keep this going?" Let's talk.

Labels: Favorites, Jesus

"A year from now you may wish you had started today." - Karen Lamb

Sometimes the timelessness of the Bible overshadows the time of the Bible. Jesus' public ministry was three years, which is actually kind of a long time. When I pick up the Bible and see how short the four gospels are, I can confuse their economy with the span of time they take place in. It feels like three months, not three years.

It's hard to get my hands around the idea that these things happened. It's somehow become easier to see them as stories that have meaning for my life today than as something that took place on this very earth, albeit 2000 years ago. But they happened and that stirs up all sorts of questions.

When Jesus turned water into wine for his friends' wedding, did He already feel the weight of what was coming three years later? If I were in His shoes, it seems like it'd be a far-off concept, not an approaching reality. What was the second year like? In that borderline heretical part of my mind, I think it might have been kind of tedious at times - like "Okay, let's get this thing going!"? But was it always thrilling? It sounds like it would be, but it also sounds like it happened in a few months time. What was the beginning of year three like? Was it starting to get more real? Had it always been real? Was there a new sense of urgency to His work?

Imagine how close you'd feel to a small group of people after three years of constant togetherness. Imagine how much you could get done if you set out with aims that you would judge all of your choices by: Demonstrate and proclaim the Kingdom and take your disciples deep enough that they'll continue the work.

In three years, Jesus set enough things in motion to change the world. I'm not Jesus, but I am invited to be crucified with Him. I'm invited to continue His work. What has that meant for my life?

What could I do in three years? Could I change Chicago? My neighborhood? My building? My office? A year from now, what will I wish I had done less of? What will I wish I had done more of? How does my place in God's story inform my choices? What could I do in three years if I took seriously God's call?

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