catching his breath

It’s easy to grow anxious observing someone else’s walk with Jesus. Others we observe may seem to have knowledge about Jesus that we don’t. How does he do it? Why does she believe that? They seem to know him deeply, I don’t. What’s up?

Peter struggled with this when Jesus shared with him some of his future persecution (end of John 21). “Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them…When Peter saw him, he asked, “Lord, what about him?” So maybe Peter questioned what John had that he didn’t. Was John going to endure the same death? If not, why not?

Jesus’ comeback is clear. “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me.” In essence here is the message I think Peter needed (and maybe we need) to hear.

Peter, I’m talking to you. You follow me and we’ll work it out together. Don’t worry about John. He and I have things squared away. As long as you both follow me things will fall into place. We will learn together. Your unique experiences will collide with my presence and you’ll be able to appropriately live out my story in your context. Just like John does in his. And when the three of us meet together in this work we’ll discuss and adjust to fit that time. But for now follow me.

There isn’t some general formula that we can apply to our lives and expect Kingdom fruit to flourish. You’re the only person who is you. I am the only one who is me. The command is to follow Jesus and when we do the results of that journey will vary between us, but that’s not the point. We’re not asked to purchase, buy into, a pre-packaged Christian experience. We’re asked to follow him. And this apprenticeship will naturally workout differently for those of us in the West than it will for those who follow Jesus in Asia, and so on.

Following Jesus as our unique selves will ensure we learn some things others who follow him don’t and perhaps miss out on some things others enjoy. But we’ll always know who we’re with and that’s what matters.

When naked we clothe ourselves. At funerals we shroud our tears in Oakleys. We protect those parts of us, physical or emotional, that we deem vulnerable to those around us. It’s natural to think, or so we’ve been conditioned to believe, that exposing certain parts of who we are leaves us short of true humanity. But does it? (Note: please don’t read the previous lines of thought as a proposal and encouragement of public nudity).

Let’s be honest, our propensity is to cover up our perceived weaknesses, to keep closed those doors to our hidden life, to protect our status as healthy humans. And this thinking can squelch a reality that may slip away from us if we’re not careful. When we train certain aspects of our humanness to vanish like ninjas when threatened we miss out on participating in and sharing with others our full humanity. And what did the incarnation of Jesus express if it didn’t express that God wants to, and does, participate in the fullness of humanity–the good, bad and ugly? God, in Jesus, embraced the vulnerabilities often disassociated from a complete person. He didn’t shy from them or throw on his shades. On the cross, and recorded for all to read, God unleashed his doubts and divulged a deep emotional trauma: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

God stamped approval on humanity by his willingness to enter it. He didn’t sit coldly from his divine perch and demand that we seek the status of gods before we could enjoy intimacy with him. He moved into our space, our world, our pain, our suffering, our condition. And Jesus didn’t enter human existence devoid of such realities. Still, he removed the typical protective measures and fully opened himself to God. He pled for his life in the garden. He wept at the passing of a friend. He cried out to God in confusion. Had he clamped shut these aspects of himself he would have come short of a full expression of humanity.

I’m afraid that failing to accept the implications of the incarnation has deepened our resolve to resist all the vulnerability we believe endangers our humanity. The irony, though, is that in doing so we cut off opportunities to be fully human. Let’s not forget that those tears and fears we believe need denied and suppressed are also emotions God seeks to share with us.

I freeze. Stop. Pause.

The words don’t come.

Here for a cause.

To tell him just some

Of the things he’s made

Possible in my life.

But thoughts on parade

Create great strife

Inside my heart.

Confusion and hesitation;

Where to start?

Oh, the frustration…

But then I stop in confidence

With reason for ponder.

Thanks to the Spirit he sent—

My God doesn’t have to wonder.

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts know the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will. –Paul.

Surface level stuff seems good in my life, but I have an aching that I am missing something deeper. Perhaps like Martha I’m distracted from spending time with Jesus, sitting at his feet, infusing the rhythms of his life with mine. When people sleep, events are over, activities at rest the emptiness consumes me.  

I wanted to pray today and couldn’t. Where are the deeper things? I’d like to think I drink of the deep well of God’s love, but I haven’t felt the refreshing of it.

The next few weeks I will seek to find the deep where I can anchor my anxiety. Hope compels me. I tried to pray today and couldn’t. So I wrote.

I like to occasionally direct you to blogs, books or articles worth reading. I found one this morning and I believe it has the chutzpah and punch to catalyze the type of shift in thinking and action churches need.

Mark Hamilton (PhD – Associate Dean, Associate Professor of Old Testament, ACU Graduate School of Theology) has written an incredible piece dealing with the demographic crisis in church culture. Read and start a conversation in your context.

Here is a line from it to stir your interest: “No one who has been a Christian for more than twenty years gets to be the “weaker brother.”

What do you think about the song? The short film?

The song blows me away…”If I can change I hope I never know.” How many live with these feelings?

I’m still baffled by the short film. It’s powerful but in a way that words can’t explain. And this is why I believe that those who follow Jesus must wrestle with art expressions such as this video.  Yes, we’ve often done a great job of engaging our intellect as we attempt to discover the human condition. But what about engaging our soul? Our emotions? Have we thrown in fully, (emotionally, spiritually, soulfully) to find solidarity with the society in which we find ourselves?

What people in our neighborhoods, schools and jobs face often defies articulation. Can we meet the mess of life without words? Yes, but.

Doing so means that we must open the emotions of our life to the vulnerability of being torn deeply by things to painful for words. Will we wear the scars of a neighbor’s wounds?

Finish the sentence. Ministering means…

Ministering means helping others find thin places. I first read about thin places in a book by Marcus Borg. It stuck and I haven’t let go of the concept. Thin places exist when heaven and earth come wonderfully close to slamming together, where only a trace of humanity’s fall remains. They are moments when a person can sense the divine within the mundane. They are experiences where things of earth seem flooded by the energy of heaven. In the moment of a thin place, a person can feel the tug of God’s presence.

Imagine you were injected with liquid metal and studded with magnetic particles. Now envision that throughout the day you were required to pass between a sheet of metal and a life-sized magnet. Both warp and lunge your direction as you walk through. You feel the impending collision ahead of time as each piece forces millions of invisible, molecular particles into your path. That’s the force of thin place.

Prayer. A certain song. A smile. Birth. That old recliner. A lover’s embrace. A glass of wine shared among friends. Psalm 23. Worn spots in the shroud of humanity’s fall.

Ministry, then, ought to encompass an intentional effort to lead others into thin places. It is God alone that can heal and mend broken hearts, and in a fallen world that bars his full disclosure we must encounter him at the thin spots, at least for now. So I understand ministers as once-broken veterans of thin place exploration, discoverers of the renewing force of God’s presence, who go back and share their discoveries with those now-broken.

In a sermon he preached on Acts 1, Walter Brueggeman invited the listeners to imagine what must have went through the mind of Mathias as he anticipated the rolling of the dice for the next spot open in the 12.

Yes! I’m the next apostle. And maybe not…

Well, now it is certain death. So goes the life of a marteria, a witness, a martyr.

To tell the truth is risky business.

The lives of Jesus followers testify to the truth of the resurrection. As witnesses who tell the truth we mock death, we defy the lies, we announce the reality of resurrection that bursts open a new direction for the future.

Imagine the early Christians. They announced a regime change. The future was open for a new world, a new peace and it had nothing to do with Rome. Risky. Dangerous.

To speak the truth is risky business.

But what do we expect? Jesus told us as much would happen:

Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man… Luke 6

When we witness the truth people won’t like it.

The traditionalists won’t like it. They will cling to their traditions and spit in your face. They’ve erected structures that enslave. Resurrection sets free! They can’t handle the moving, life-giving power of God’s Spirit bringing life and newness to everything.

The religious won’t like it. They have their religion by which they keep everything the way they want it…they sell their religion, they perform for the Sunday gathering and pass the plate. You remember in Acts 19 when Paul upset the silversmith?

Many current American church groups can’t take it. Our culture of consumerism will fight back… Church has been streamlined and polished to the point that the resurrection life will break through and disrupt everything…

In a resurrection reality there is room at the table for the poor and oppressed… they’re not just a line on the budget

In a resurrection reality those with a past have a future and a contribution… they’re not just the latest how-not-to lesson for our children.

When preachers witness the truth of resurrection people squirm, they create excuses, they grow uncomfortably angry… it’s risky to speak the truth to a church culture conditioned to be fed and satisfied spiritually, to consume the latest religious product… How many churches today would have Jesus minister to them, really?

The resurrection of Jesus isn’t self-help speech that encourages you for the next week. Our gatherings aren’t intended to offer the latest pop-psychology to make you feel better about yourself.

We gather to witness the resurrection of Jesus and acknowledge our participation in it. We meet to dare the powers to go ahead and try something. We gather to regroup as we prepare to storm the gates of hell another week. We together fall to our knees in worship to announce as one the resurrection of our Savior who alone holds our allegiance. In doing so, we renounce all other allegiances.

Attending a Christian gathering should be the riskiest thing one does all week. Because we are identifying ourselves with a group who counters the current society and its attempts to offer life. A people who hold up the poor and create solidarity with them. A community that condemns sexism, racism, injustice, oppression. We gather to say that the culture outside of the kingdom of God has no claim on us, death can’t defeat us!

And if… if you sit there, like me, wondering about the risk, asking what risk? It may be time to reevaluate our witness and our testimony. It may be time to rethink whether our lives express the truth of resurrection as incumbent upon the body of Christ, or have we settled for a rather sorry version of pop-culture religion?

John Dobbs has launched a grass-roots effort to honor ministers by asking bloggers to blog about a minister(s) who has impacted them (you can read more about it at his blog). I love the idea. Here is my contribution.

I come from a family of preachers: a grandpa, an uncle, a cousin and a dad. Dad didn’t always preach full-time, but he served as a deacon, which if done right exemplifies the essence of a minister. Now (and for the last 10 or so years) he ministers in the pulpit for a small congregation in Texas. Not only that, he directed a week of camp at Green Valley Bible Camp for around 9-10 years, and a majority of those years were directed while he worked full-time as a network analyst. He took his vacation to minister to young people in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas instead of sipping margaritas on the beach (actually I can’t convince him to have a drink with me so he wouldn’t have done that anyway…but the line sounded good).

Even though I actually started preaching full-time before he did, he still produced an incredible impact on my journey as a minister. Honestly, my initial mode and style of preaching came from other places and not him. I endured an indoctrination at a school of preaching and struggled to find a message and ministry of grace. He deserves no credit for that part of my ministry.

Though he raised me around rigid conservatism, he actually showed me the path of questioning everything while still getting along with those with whom we disagree. While a deacon, dad rarely let the preacher off the hook. He wanted to know why the preacher said what he said. I remember frequently waiting for dad to finish talking to the preacher after all the lights had been turned out in the church building. He wouldn’t settle for a traditional answer, he wanted to know God’s direction. This momentum of questioning eventually caught up to me, moved through me and swept me into a new era of my own ministry. This is where dad gets the credit.

He taught me how to question. He passed on to me the gift of relentlessness when it comes to finding God. He showed me that going against the traditional flow is what we’re often called to do, even if it stirs up family Christmas and comfortable congregations. He never liked the taste of canned answers and I’ve inherited those taste buds.

So Tony Linton, dad: Thanks. I now enjoy a ministry flooded by grace and truth because you taught me to never settle and to never quit asking questions.

If you have a minister in mind then write up a tribute to him/her and explain the positive impact on your life. Thanks to John Dobbs as well for the great idea. Keep the flame of encouragement going… get to writing. There’s got to be some more good preachers out there, somewhere.

This hits home to my family and me… but I thought it was hysterically subversive. Check it out here.

[Disclaimer: If you're offended by mildly crude humor and some foul language just move on.  I'm telling you now. If you watch and are offended and aghast at my linking to the clip you are without excuse.]