Badge of Shame

I went to my usual coffee shop this morning for the latte and orange-cranberry scone and I noticed the barista taking my order, a young woman who’s been working there for several years as she completes her university education, was wearing something unusual around her neck.  I had to look more closely.  It was a sort of homemade medallion, an award of some kind, the kind of thing you might see around the neck of a child pretending they’d won an Olympic Gold medal.  The strap was polka-dotted, various pastels on a light blue background (I think, I might have the color wrong), and the medallion itself was about 3 inches in diameter.  I leaned down and read the inscription…”Badge of Shame.”

Needless to say, that was the last thing I’d expected the medallion to say, and I thought, okay, I have to ask.  So I did.  And the young woman said that she was wearing it because she had said something insensitive and unkind and so she was wearing the badge of shame.  And then she told me, even as a strange look hurried across her face, that it was sort of hard for her to wear.   I was astonished to realize that this was no joke, but that here in a public coffee shop, someone was declaring freely that they were ashamed of a particular action they had taken.

I spoke to the owner about it, who was actually making my latte.  He said an employee had been late earlier in the week and a customer who teaches at a Montessori school voluntarily decided to make a “badge of shame” for the coffee shop.  The owner said since then, various people have worn it, and that the most interesting thing was that each one put it on themselves.  No one was telling anyone to wear it.

Wow.  Metaphors for days.   What strikes me, though, is how my heart sort of melted for the woman wearing the badge.  In the moment that she confessed that wearing it was hard for her, I saw a vulnerability that can’t help but make you love someone.   At the Northwest Church, we’ve spoken a lot in recent months about a culture of confession, and the fact that to speak the truth about our own broken state is a kind of “doorway to freedom.”   The owner of the shop and I talked about so many people wear badges of shame all the time, hidden away, grafted onto their souls.

As I drove away, and as I sit here even now, I wonder if anyone is going to “forgive” her, extend her some grace, and if they did, would she receive it?

Grace is everything, everything is grace…

Inspiration, Work, and The Spirit

I told the assembly yesterday that in spite of my best efforts last week, I couldn’t really get my sermon to work. I knew what I wanted to say, and I knew where the text sort of needed to go, but I couldn’t put it into words. They were gracious as I stumbled my way through, but I never quite landed the words or the ideas I had in mind. Odd, and frustrating. But as I talked to people throughout the day, the ideas crystallized and I begin to find ways to express what I had in mind.

Luke 24:45 says simply that Jesus opened the minds of the disciples to understand the scriptures. What interested me was Christ’s role in this moment, and what actually happened. Was it hocus-pocus, him waving his arms over their foreheads so that a sort of curtain dropped away from their minds? I’m kidding, of course, but as I told the church, there are any number of Greek words here that Luke could have used to describe Jesus’ action (as opposed to dianoigo, which is translated “to open”). It seems that something only Christ could have done was in play, something more than him simply explaining things more clearly.

As we move toward Pentecost, the Holy Spirit (the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of Truth, the Comforter) is coming into our conversation. Traditionally, for the folks in our religious heritage, the Holy Spirit’s work has been relegated to “teacher,” being the agent by which we understand scripture. Fair enough, but so often, all that really meant was that we thought rationality and intelligence were somehow purged by pious living, and that if we thought hard enough, we’d get doctrine right, get our facts right, and we’d be good to go–no mess about power and healing and all that stuff. We are children of the Enlightenment, and whatever power will be exhibited will be in the realm of the rational, and it will manifest itself in little more than better ideas.

Now don’t get me wrong–ideas, in some sense, are everything. And I absolutely believe the Spirit of God is the means by which we will discover and engage God’s ideas of living. And no question but that the realm of intelligence and rationality is one of the primary environments in which this discovery will occur. In fact, I called the church to confession and repentance over our slacking approach to scripture these days. We must be far more rigorous than we’ve been in our study and understanding. We used to be far better students than we are today.

That said, we also need to acknowledge that only God can instruct us as we approach the text. For hundreds of years (and still today), skilled scholars and students of scripture missed the fact that, according to our faith and understanding, Old Testament prophecy pointed to Jesus as the anointed one. Rigor, intelligence, hard work, strict logic–these things alone do not add up to the discovery of the wisdom of God.   And power?  Well, I’ll come back to that…

Here’s the analogy I wish I’d used yesterday. Robert Grudin, in his wonderful book The Grace of Great Things, suggests (as do many others) that artistic inspiration cannot be commanded or controlled. In other words, inspiration shows up when it shows up. But he suggests that an environment can be created where inspiration will show far more often than not. He calls it an “ethos of inspiration.” In brief, all he really means is that a certain work ethic and attitude will create smoother pathways for inspiration to travel. A writer that writes everyday is going to be visited by his mysterious friend Inspiration far more often than the writer who sits waiting for inspiration to show up.

In the same way, those who dig into the word with sleeves rolled up and concentration focused are far more likely to hear where the Spirit is leading them than those who skim the text in a perfunctory daily read. The quality of our attention means much, much more than we think as we engage the living word of God.

Off to work, praying for inspiration…

Jim and Caspar Go To Church

If you haven’t read it, and you’re interested in the conversation going on among evangelicals who are tired of “doing church” the same old way, this is a great book to check out. It’s a fast read and one that will make you think differently about what happens on a Sunday morning.

Long story short, Jim is a long-time Christian and pastor who has dedicated the rest of his life to reimagining evangelism and enlists Caspar in a unique adventure to help illuminate the way Christians of various ilks come across to the target audience–namely, atheists. Caspar doesn’t believe in any religion or God, and he and Jim hit it off, heading across the country on a two-month jaunt to check out some of America’s most happening (according to somebody) churches. Jim is one of the architects of Off-the-map, a ministry that has been “helping Christians be normal” since 2001. The honesty of the conversation hinges on a pretty simple reality: none of this is intended to move Caspar closer to becoming a Christian, but is instead a simple extension of Jim’s passion to understand something potentially profound about Christianity in America today.

The book is a strong critique of the potential disconnect between the normal Evangelical practice of a Sunday (or Saturday, as the case may be) and the first time visitors that walk through the door. Obviously, for atheists and other variations of folks who don’t follow Jesus, to walk into a church service is to walk into a foreign land. They rate churches (See ChurchRater if you want to join in) according to various levels of authenticity and connectivity. Their ratings are, of course, completely subjective, and they state up front that that’s as it should be, because that’s the way people enter the door. Music, greeters, communion buckets, preaching, technical elements, and various other elements are critiqued, mocked, praised, and analyzed in ways that most churches would find scary and offensive. I find the honesty of the conversation refreshing, and there is much to learn.

Having said that, I’ll add that its a disquieting read. Expressions of spirituality are all over the map, and I’m not sure I’m very proud of what is revealed in Jim and Caspar Go To Church. I’m not sure I’m crazy about what it reveals in me. I love traditional church and I love most of the contemporary iterations of it, but when I think about Jesus walking the backroads of Galilee and Judea, I wonder what he had in mind. The question that comes up over and over from Caspar is a haunting one: “Is this what Jesus asked you guys to do?”

Makes you wonder…

The Elusive Nature of Words

I have no idea why I wrote that title just now, except that I’ve been studying scripture this morning, bemoaning my lack of knowledge and training. There is of course plain meaning in words, but there is also the shimmered layering that floats over centuries and translation. The appearance of a word in language is a mystery all its own, and I see it as frankly miraculous that such a brilliant notion as language exists. That ideas and conceptions of reality, both concrete and abstract, can be effectively–if not exhaustively–transferred from one piece of gray matter to another is astounding, leaves me in awe. It mostly goes unnoticed, being as how we get accustomed to asking for bread and water and love and peace and it all gets pretty normalized. We breathe, we speak, we understand.

But it’s not that simple. Postmodernism has taught us that words are constructs, and aren’t the things themselves. The word “love” isn’t love. So words are pointers to realities. “Jeff” is something different than the reality of me. Things would definitely change if you called me something else, but the growing, transforming reality that is me would still be…me.

Why bother with all this prattle about words? I suppose because scripture (and all writing) is composed of these pesky things, all strung in a row, pulling along meaning like so many frisky train cars. What a miracle it is to understand anything, and scripture comes to us over thousands of years, layered in evolving denotation and connotation, meaning not out of reach by any means, but often, I think, more difficult to get to than we allow. The writer of the New Testament book of Hebrews called scripture “living and active”–actually the words there are “For the word of God is living and active..” (Hebrews 4:12)–and like any living being or thing, there is much more to grasp than meets the eye.

What’s sad about this is that we are poor students of scripture. I make no real judgment about the meaning of the end result of that fact, but still, it’s true. As we jettison linear thinking and rely more and more on experience to gauge our wisdom by, there is frankly less reason to try and grasp the fullness of what scripture has to say. And we all know the sad reality of everyone gathering around the fire barrels of our own experience, comparing notes, deciding that there is nothing we can gather around that can speak to all of us of life’s final meaning, it’s truest origins, it’s great and overriding meta-narrative (forgive me, I still think there is one, dense and difficult, miraculous and mysterious as it may be).

The end of me thinking through this little idea is that we need to dig deeper to find meaning and wisdom. We need to resist thinking that our first understanding of a thing is by default the best thing. What does a passage of scripture mean and how do we get to it? Again, we (the church, the people who follow Jesus, the folks who look to scripture as being alive and living) are not the students we once were, and I can’t help but think we suffer for it. God is gracious and remains near, and of course, the map is not the territory (let the reader understand) (it drives me crazy when scripture says that), but still, since we’re traveling the territory, the map is awesome to have.

If we could just read it…

Healing in the Wind

As I look around my circles of friends, many of them involved in the life of the church at Northwest, I can sense good things on the move. Healing is hard to quantify, hard to describe. In my own life, as damaged as it was early on, the movement toward greater stretches of peace and hard work, lesser months of self-obsession and depression…well, it all seemed like pushing so many boulders up hill, Sisyphus work. Sometimes I think of maturing and the acquisition of character in terms of erosion, or sculpture. It is such slow and careful work, the chisel of time and choice tapping away at the edges of rock, so thick in places, eventually revealing the human being underneath. I suppose the eventual revelation of the final form depends on who’s holding the chisel, who’s doing the hammering.

Last week, I faced a mini-crisis about identity, leading, artistry, and a certain affinity with melancholy. One thing I’m sure of: there are many ways of being in the world. Part of my default understanding is that God– infinite in knowledge and wisdom and perspective, knowing how humans would move through the ages with an evolving knowledge of both themselves, their world, and their God–knew that humans would exhibit indescribable and incomprehensible diversity over cultures, generations, continents, and personalities. The ever present tension between the God-image inside us and the sin nature that seeks to destroy shapes our lives, and how we dance in the middle of that tension eventually reveals who we will be. That dance sometimes becomes hard to choreograph, the steps I find myself moving through a bit beyond my abilities. I often say that I’m living out of my comfort zone almost everyday. Last week was a week I sort of wanted to go back to the comfort zone. Beauty and art and my monkish life of writing has so much good in it, but then, just now, God has me moving in a counterpoint line, a rising melody, if you will, that seems foreign to me, a bit out of range. I am mixing my artistic metaphors, I know, but that notion of something in me that belongs to God alone being revealed through something analogous to making art, with God as artist and I am nothing but material…I don’t know how to put it.

Then, this morning, after a rich and full and heart-rending Sunday (for reasons unstated), I wake to find there is healing in the air. Not healing for me, but for others, for people I care about. Not all of them would fess up to it, and there are those in my life I worry about, wondering if healing will ever come. But none of those I care about belong to me, and they will walk as they will walk. Even as I hunker down to study this morning, to begin that searching for the Spirit that comes and goes as He wills, I have a sense of healing being close, on the move, almost like a scent sliding through open skies.

He will not overwhelm…

Sustainable Pace

Slow down.  Breathe.  Pay attention.  Be quiet.  Listen.

All these words assume something other than running willy-nilly hard-as-we-can-go-so-we-can-do-ever-more-and-more-good-things.  This past Monday night, I sort of lost my mind at a meeting and went on a passionate tirade about beauty and other things, making declarations that I think are largely true about our heritage’s disconnect with beauty and physical life.   My means of communication was unusual for me–I don’t usually end up yelling.  And truthfully, I don’t think I was yelling like I could have been yelling, but for me, it was a larger presence than usual. (How’s that for fudging?) I apologized profusely to those in my path that night, and thankfully, they forgave me, all looking a little befuddled that Jeff had finally lost it.

Red flags went up inside me, asking me to pay attention to what was going on.  Truth is, and I mentioned this in my last post on this blog, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve been working the past six to nine months at an unsustainable pace.  It’s funny…when I think “discipleship” I am even more convicted of this than before.  There is an urgency to discipleship, certainly, but there is also the notion that frenzied, hurried, gas-pedal-to-the-floor living is not what Jesus modeled, nor what Sabbath is about.

I’ve said many times that there is a hidden monk living in me, and while I don’t advocate a complete removal from the world for a lifetime, there is something deep to be said for silence and quiet and reflection.   Yesterday’s Sabbath was an oasis for me, and I feel much more in tune with the rhythms God has established for me.  I have to be careful saying that, because I don’t want to engage in spiritual hyperbole, or try to justify my own desire to slow down by adding some God-language to it.   But in my heart I remain convicted that much of how we live as Americans is too, too fast.   This is a place to be counter-cultural, and I don’t have to tell anyone that it’s costly.

Breathing deeper today…

Blogging at the Church Blog, too

So now there are two blogs going.

Truth is, I’ve been working far too many hours at a pace that’s unsustainable.   Not unusual for people in ministry, I think, so I’ve gone back and retooled, thinking through what God is asking me to do once again.  I need to be writing more, venturing out into the blogosphere, knowing that I think differently when letters are appearing one after another in front of me.

So, we’ve established another blog over at The Between Journey.  This is going to track our ongoing life together as a church, touching on sermons, upcoming events, leadership and other topics impacting the day-to-day life at the church.   Here at this blog, the work will continue to be more musing and reflecting on culture, personal life, and my ongoing push and pull with beauty, Christian faith, and postmodern culture.

And actually, there’s a third blog happening as well, though we’re off to a slow start.   The Arts Ministry at the church has a blog here simply called NW Arts.  We haven’t done a lot with it yet, but look to see more in the coming months.  My good friend Marty Gordon helped us set this up, and if you haven’t seen his work, you need to. Go check Marty out at Martworks.

More writing coming…

Disciple

What a strange word.  A religious word, a word for church-goers, a biblical word to be used for all manner of things.  A word hard to get to in any real way, ideas of what it means bandied about like so many ping pong balls.   On the other hand, people experience the core of the idea on a regular basis, the most natural thing in the world.

At the core, to be a disciple is to respond to an inner call that says, “I want to be like that.”

However, the gap is huge between desire, intention, and transforming action.  We are people of the moment, responding to the impulse of the “now”, unwilling to deny ourselves anything to have the perceived need of the moment.  There are thousand things we see and declare, “I want to be like that.”

But sometimes things capture us, capture the deepest part of our hearts.  We begin to say “no” to this or that–food, certain acquaintances, old habits, ancient temptations, weekly appointments–all so we can begin to re-align ourselves to become “like that.”   Maybe its so that we emulate the positive folk of the world, or to integrate thinking the thoughts of “the rich” so we can be rich, too.  Or we learn to say the kinds of things people say when they are effective with women or men.  We arrange constantly as a culture, flitting back and forth between all the “like thats” we want to be.

To be like Jesus.  To be his disciple.  To watch not only what he says, but what he does and how he does it.  To watch for his action in the life of the men and women around me, and when I recognize it, to imitate and implement that pattern of action. To connect and interact as he did, as he demonstrated in the gospels.   To be transformed, the old man both buried and gone, but also raising his head over and over, like the whack-a-mole that just won’t give up.  The action of disciple-being is raising the mallet and whacking the old man again, over time watching him erode and fade as the new man rises, becomes more and more solid over time.

Self-denial.  I wish I didn’t understand this.  One of God’s graces in my life lately has been to make this more and more plain.   Frankly, it is not terribly ambiguous.   I want, I give up.   I want, I release the want.  I crave and weep when I don’t have, and I lay that down.   Why would God give me this deep thing (plug in whatever you want) and then ask me to give it up?   Surely it can’t be true.

Of course it can.  The world is not what we think.  Life is not what we think.  Could Jesus have said it any more plainly?

He who wants to save his life will lose it.  He who loses his life for my sake will find it.

The crushing blow of freedom.

Sounds muscular, sounds not as friendly as we’d like, sounds costly.

Bummer.

Am I a disciple of the Christ?

The Life of Prayer

Honestly, for many people, including a spiritual giant like C.S. Lewis, prayer has been, and remains, a conundrum.  How should we pray?  The disciples of Jesus asked him to teach them, and he modeled what we call “The Lord’s Prayer.”  Short, concise, to the point, covering all the bases, the Lord’s Prayer speaks praise, petition, forgiveness and a call for the will of God.  It is infused with trust, and assumes God’s ever-present sovereignty and love.   So we often pray that prayer, mumbling the words most often in concert with a crowd of some kind, the words crossing our lips without much thought, like soldiers carrying bundles they think are little more than bedrolls, but are in reality sensitive explosives.

And then there’s the poor fig tree that gets cursed in Matthew 21 and Mark 11.   Jesus is hungry and there are no figs on the tree, so Jesus declares that the tree will never bear fruit again, and it withers on the spot.  The disciples are amazed–”How did that happen?”–and Jesus says point blank,  “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”  That’s Mark’s version (Mark 11:24) and Matthew says it like this: ” If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.” (Matthew 21:22).

Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane gives us one more picture of prayer that throws our thinking out of kilter when he says he wants one thing, but he’s willing to go with whatever God decides.  Luke 22:42 - “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.”  So Jesus gives God an out, and yields to what God wants.   Many take this to be the primary model, especially glad its there because it allows them to pray without much faith, and yet they can still seem as pious as anyone else.   How many of us, in effect, end up praying something like, “Help us, or heal so-and-so, but since we know you probably won’t, or can’t, or whatever, do your will, and it will all be fine, whatever.”   And those people who we see praying as if something powerful and real was going to happen as a result of the praying, well…we’re pretty sure those folks are just religious crazies.

The Spirit comes into play as well, Paul says, in those times when we don’t know what to pray.   He groans to express things we can’t find words for.  And Paul prays all kinds of prayers, calls people to be devoted to prayer.   And then James implies that we shouldn’t even bother if we doubt, because God is not going to give anything (at least not any wisdom) to those who doubt.   Furthermore, James states frankly that the prayer of the righteous man is the kind of prayer you want, because it’s strong and powerful, and that we need to confess our sins to one another in order to keep that healing and powerful righteousness going.

One more passage:  Luke 11, after Jesus talks about the Lord’s Prayer, he tells the story of the man who’s asleep, but whose friend comes banging on the door looking for some bread.  In a powerful picture of prayer, Jesus says the man gets out of bed and gives his friend what he wants because of the friend’s boldness.  So we are to come before the Father with boldness, Jesus teaches.

So how do we pray?

It seems to me that Jesus faith in God was immovable.  It must be assumed that Jesus prayer in the Garden is not indicative of a a struggle of faith in his Father.  There was no question of what God could do in Jesus mind.   God could have removed “the cup.”  But we must be careful here, because many of us might wish to say the same thing of our approach to prayer.  We, too, know that God can do what we are asking, we just don’t know if He will.   But let’s be real.  Jesus faith in God was so different in quality that it seems it was different in kind.   Jesus’ faith was born of long experience of seeing prayers answered right and left in bold and even theatrical ways.   His life was a long line of unbroken obedience.  When he prayed “Take this cup from me,” there was not an iota or a whit that wondered if God was able to do it.

I dare say few of us have the faith of Christ as we kneel in prayer.

Having said that, I must confess that own prayer life has been pretty weak-kneed over the years.  It seems that the unrelenting position of the NT writers is one of boldness and power and “banging on the door” rather than “hat-in-hand” begging.  God’s will is assumed–He will do as He wills–yet “let His children clamor!”

I told the church on Sunday morning it was time to pray as we have never prayed.  To open our hearts to what God is doing among his people here.  We are heading toward Pentecost, and I am holding on to the way the passage ends in Luke 11.

“Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

Batten down the hatches, boys… 

Doing Visual Art

I am Peter.  Mixed Media on Canvas (200

Crosses to Bear.  Mixed Media on Canvas (2008) 

Stations of the Cross demanded I do something I haven’t done much of in the past. Creating visual art that is not a bridge into a theatre production was a new world for me. It’s quiet work, work that is by nature reflective, but the process of thinking about it is far different than reflecting on an idea.

Last year, Lent and Easter were all about photography. I spent hours looking at flowers, cities, shrubs, birds, cars–anything that would take me out of the reflective process, at least in terms of thinking about rational ideas. The effect was profound, and life hasn’t been the same since. This year, working on the visual art pieces for our Stations exhibit, I found much the same thing happening: a suspension of linear thinking, and a soft-focus intuitive openness to what was “suggesting” itself through the work. It was draining and exciting at the same time. I spent hours piddling around with this color or that, this structure or that, playing with this found object, then throwing it away. Having no idea what I was doing, I was just responding to the moment, in much the same way an actor does.

What did I come up with? A couple of pieces that I enjoyed, though I would hardly call them art, especially by my definition. “The skilled creation of form with metaphoric meaning.” Skilled creation? Nah…but what fun it is to try.

Go make something…