A Creative God

Some days, I just look at my computer, hoping God will supernaturally possess the chips and circuits and a newsletter article and four sermons would pop out.  It’s a hope and a prayer born out of panic and frustration more than any real need for God to write an article for the newsletter.  If God really wanted to write the newsletter article, do you think He would need to use my computer? 

Now and then writing just becomes hard.  The creative process doesn’t follow any schedule and doesn’t come up on demand.  It has to be nurtured and cultivated.  There is real work that goes into keeping ideas floating around in your head.

I know, I know, I just said a bad word:  work.  We Lutherans are suspicious of that word.  We rightly believe that our salvation and our standing with God is by Grace through Faith.  Luther himself in his explanation to the third article of the Apostle’s Creed in the Small Catechism says “I believe that by my own understanding or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him….” 

That’s true.  And it is also true that just like the creative process, we have to be open and ready to hear and receive the gift of Jesus Christ and his new life.  We have to be listening and ready to answer the call of God.  We have to be vigilant in looking for God’s voice.

Because you know, God could take over my computer or your computer one day and spit out a crystal clear message for our lives.  Or God could call on the phone in the voice of a neighbor wanting to go out for coffee just to talk.  Or God could be working the fields with you.

Dr. Kevin Anderson, a marriage counselor from Toledo, calls this divinity in disguise.  All around us, God is dwelling in the people we meet and the situations we find ourselves.  It can be tiring and frustrating listening and looking for God because God comes up like the creative process, when and where He feels like it. 

As we enter into this time of Thanksgiving and Christmas, the sounds and calls will be loud all around us.  Some of them will be God’s call and some will not.  Be ready to listen and look for God in unexpected places over the next couple of months.  The wait and the search can be long but it is never fruitless.  Are you ready?

SanBPam wrote: let me be clear that “playing nice” applies to all. I understand exactly what you mean about how a policy of niceness can be applied unequally. It is a deep concern of mine. So, ground rules would seem to include such things as avoiding name calling, attempting to express ourselves respectfully, and posting with the purpose of dialogue, not attack.

My response:  IMHO, it is not the equality of playing nice, it’s the belief that playing nice is the higher good. “Can’t we all just get along” seems to be the pinnacle of achievement way too often. Anything that is conflictual (even respectful debate) is to be avoided. Ideas are not so much mulled over and picked apart as much as folks are marginalized (often quite nicely) for questioning the “culture of nice.” Feelings are more important than facts. Being nice is more important than being right.

Examples of forbidding ideas:
Anyone voting against Sarah Palin is sexist.
Anyone voting against Barack Obama is racist.

Examples of debating ideas:
Sarah Palin’s choice to keep her son instead of aborting him is made possible by her families ability to care for him. I’m not sure her policies would allow more folks to be able to make that choice.
Barack Obama seems to be more concerned about making abortion legal, rather than doing every thing he can to make it rare to nonexistent. He is not so much pro-choice as he is pro-abortion according to his limited voting record.

Do you see the difference? The first two shut down debate and do not allow for there to be any other viewpoint. The second two allow for different ideas and interpretations and open the floor for debate. In the midst of debate, there may not be views changed as much as refined. Saying someone is wrong is not the same as the first two.

From Bill Cosby sketch about Noah

Narrator:  I just wondering, what would be the effect of an Ark on the average neighbor?

Now, here’s a guy going to work, 7 o’clock in the morning Noah’s next door neighbor and he sees the Ark.

Neighbor:  Hey! You up there!

Noah:  What you want?

Neighbor:  What is this?

Noah:  It’s an Ark

Neighbor:  Aha.  You wanna get it outta my driveway?  I gotta get to work.  Listen, what this thing for anyway?

Noah:  I can’t tell you.  Hahahahaha!

Neighbor:  Well, I mean can’t you give me a little hint?

Noah:  You wanna a hint?

Neighbor:  Yes, please

Noah:  How long can you tread water?  Hahahah!

 
It loses something in print but the idea comes through I think.  Noah has a call from God that’s got to look really strange to those who are not privy to Noah’s conversation with God.  He’s building this big old boat in the middle of a driveway with no water to be found.  I imagine he got a lot of questions and probably had enough of them.  Bill Cosby portrays Noah as sarcastic with his comment, “How long can you tread water?” 

Fast forward to the 21^st century and a call from God still looks pretty strange.  None of us are building Arks in our driveways but we are asking strange things of people like getting up early on Sunday morning instead of sleeping in and studying centuries old writings and claiming they have importance for today.  We are celebrating a sacrament that makes the claim that we are eating and drinking the body and blood of our God.  We claim that somehow water and Word makes a difference in our life, even if that event happened before we can remember.  We are a strange people.

It’s tempting to get a little sarcastic like Noah and just blow people off.  A colleague suggested asking the question to folks outside the faith, “How’s that [life] working for you?”  I’ll bet the answer most times is “Just fine, thank you.”  Just like I can imagine Noah’s neighbor answering, “I can tread water just fine and for long enough.”  Those answers come because the folks answering don’t realize what they are missing.

They don’t know what their missing because we haven’t shared it with them.  Oh, we may have shared the annoying stuff that happens at church:  the sermons that go too long because the pastor missed one, the council meetings that are boring, the new hymn that I just didn’t like.  We forget to share the challenge of living a life of faith, the leadership of those who have shown us the way and the support from the community when life spirals out of control.

Kiwanis members are encouraged to work on an “elevator speech.”  This is a quick synopsis of what your club does in the community and why you are in Kiwanis that can be shared in an elevator when someone asks.  Do you have an elevator speech about your faith?  It doesn’t have to be complicated.  It does have to be short and to the point.  When people ask, they are not looking for the whole story, they just want the highlights.  Here’s my elevator speech:

I became a Christian because my parents and my community led me to faith through their words and deeds.  I remain a Christian because over and over God proves himself to be faithful.  When I am lost, he leads me to where I need to be.  When I am found, God leads me to bigger and better then I could ever be on my own.  In the community of faith I find evidence of God’s power and wisdom that sustains me and challenges me to things that are greater than me.

What’s your elevator speech?

How does he stay that calm? Wouldn’t you want to race into the locker room? Wouldn’t you be speeding off at the last mention of “home of the brave …”? This after all is your history, your legacy, your chance. You’ve waited a lifetime.

So what’s a few more minutes, I guess? Phelps, rather than running off, circled around the deck, threw flowers to his mother, posed for photos with the other swimmers. Eleven minutes to his race. Ten minutes. Plates falling here. Plates falling there.

 If you get a chance read the whole article.  It made my morning.

A church with too much masculine spirit succumbs to legalism. It’s all about performance–what you do for God. There’s often a pastor who rules the congregation with an iron fist. There are silly rules, frustrating rituals, and simplistic black and white answers that don’t work in the real world. It’s about fear, not grace. Salvation is a free gift but everything else must be earned.

A legalistic church can foster horrific abuse. I have a friend who was being physically and verbally abused by her husband. She went to the elders of the church for help. These men read her Scriptures and accused her of “being under the influence of a spirit of rebelliousness.” They told her to “go home and submit to your husband.” They did not rebuke the man; he continued to enjoy his position in the church.

Since too much masculine spirit has the potential to create this kind of abuse, one might think the solution is to reject the masculine in favor of the feminine spirit. Yet this leads to another kind of abuse I call “Velvet Coffin Christianity:” show up on Sunday, participate in comforting rituals, listen to a pabulum sermon of familiar truths; then go home and forget all about your faith until next Sunday. Velvet Coffin Christianity is rampant in America today. After Cynthia Woolever and Deborah Bruce surveyed more than one million churchgoers, they reported that “half of all worshippers say they are not growing in their faith.” I suspect the true figure is 75 to 80 percent; after all, would you admit to a pollster that you were not growing in your faith?

Legalism makes the headlines, but Velvet Coffin Christianity is the real cancer in the church today. Its key characteristic is comfort. Everyone is so nice to each other. And we choose a church based on how comfortable it makes us feel. I wish I had a dollar for every conversation I’ve heard like this one:

Corrine: Why did you choose First Church, Mary?

Mary: I’m so comfortable here. Everyone is so nice to me and the kids. The pastor is so nice.

Men gag on this kind of religion. It’s angel food cake, soft, spongy, and unsatisfying. It does not reflect the wildness of Jesus. Everywhere Christ went, He created an uproar and discomfort. He made it a point to insult people (Matt. 23:13-39). He even called his best friend “Satan” (Mark 8:33). (That was a horrendous insult, akin to calling a Holocaust survivor “Hitler.”) Although He comforted the needy, an encounter with Jesus was often an uncomfortable experience, especially for religious people.

Is Velvet Coffin Christianity really abuse? Yes, just as legalism is abuse. People don’t see it as such because it’s not sensational or salacious. It doesn’t make good gossip. It feels so nice. But it’s abuse nonetheless. Churches are comforting Christians to death, because the feminine spirit has taken over and the masculine spirit has withdrawn. In time, so do men.

I included that rather long quote because that gets to the heart of what has been gnawing at me now that I am three years into parish ministry. My wife calls my Fire/EMS work my “guy time.” Why is that work “guy time” and the church not? Murrow puts it well “the feminine spirit has taken over.”

We are so afraid of “abuse” that we in the church abuse with a “Velvet Coffin.” Christian churches aren’t dying because the Gospel is irrelevant to today’s society, the Church has become abusive. We “proclaim” a message that asks everything, and then say “O never mind, not really for you, just go about your business.” We don’t expect anything of anybody except to be “comfortable.”

When Dr. Kent Hunter visited our congregation, he said much the same thing. If we’re about making people comfortable, we will not reach the unchurched. We have to be willing to make people uncomfortable and do some out of the box kind of stuff. In other words, take risks.

A few months ago I used this video as a sermon illustration:

I recommend David Murrow’s book to you. He has lots of good stuff in there, encouragement as well as challenge. I’m looking forward to continuing my reading and “re-finding” insights for fulfilling Christ’s call for our ministry both here in our neighborhood, and the world over.

What will the Bible in 90 days program look like? Beginning in mid-September those who are interested will agree to read through the Bible, cover to cover, in 90 days. That works out to about 12 pages a day (40-60 minutes, depending on your reading speed). There is no cost to participate in the program. However, if participants would like to buy the Bible that comes with the program, it is about $15 and the participant’s guide is about $8.

There will be information and updates posted here.   I hope that you can join us reading the Bible in 90 days.

What was sweeter was this picture. (click on the picture to see a larger version)

Before every game, the girls always sat together and talked about the game. For this night, my daughter (she is the one on the far left with her side to the camera) decided they needed to pray. Another parent caught this picture of her and her teammates praying with the sun setting behind them. These kids are hyper and loud when they are playing (those of you who have been around softball at any level know what I am talking about) but for these moments they were all still and praying together.I asked my daughter what she prayed for. She said just the normal things: that they would play hard, that God would help them play well even when they were tired, and that He would help them have fun. For a seven almost eight year old that’s pretty good. It sure made an impression on her teammates parents as they passed this picture around. The parent who took it made copies and lots of folks took one.