us

Where is God in all of this?

How many times have you heard this?  Let’s be honest, how many times have w questioned it ourselves?

Go ahead and fill in the blank:  where is God when ______________?  Why did God allow ____________?  Is God responsible for _______________?

It is not evil to question, to wonder, to beg for answers to our deepest hurts, to the world’s shameful deeds; to wonder why God did not put an end to this hurricane or that war; why children and women are still sold as slaves into the sex trade, why good people get cancer, lose spouses, children, houses.  After all, we are given good precedent:  David and others cries out in the Psalms – our sacred scriptures!  He is unafraid of questioning, of showing his weakness in attempting to rely on God in the middle of turbulent circumstances.  Look at Psalm 5 and 6 and Psalm 10, on and on through these songs.  We have a rich history of tears, frustration, fear and hope, beggars of God’s mercy for salvation from oppression and illness, questions without answers.

And yet someone comes to me with such questions, I’m tempted to offer answers.  I want to relieve burdens, to bandage wounds, to heal deep hurts.  I want to defend God against accusations of distance and disinterest, to give God an “out” and try to reason the world and other un-understandable things.  Then, when I watch a special on Children for Sale and see the young children around the world who are in slavery to those who pimp them out for a few dollars, I can’t help but wonder where God is in the middle of this.  So I try to rationalize Him yet again, and make excuses for the perceived absence.

But we don’t need to defend God.  God is God and big enough to handle Himself. Does He need our defense?  Perhaps in all our asking, we’ll find God in our questions; if we listen closely, maybe we will hear him tell us the answer: 

You: you’re the answer to your prayer.  I am at work within you.  I will always work through my people.  The fields are white for harvest, the needs are huge and the risks real, so pray that I will send workers to the fields.  In the meanwhile, you go.  Remember, I am working through you.

Maybe we are the answer to our own prayers.

Maybe God is stirring us to act.

What will we say?

(for more info on the child sex industry and what you can do to help oppose this and save children’s lives, please see International Justice Mission)

generous

Persecuted though they were, Christians in the early church were noticed by emperors, some of whom even wrote that Christians put others to shame by serving the poor, aiding the sick, and caring for the dead and dying.  In other words, those inside the church took care of people better than those outside!

These Christians were not simply known for their beliefs, but by the actions those beliefs inspired.  Isaiah writes of this progression: “Feed the hungry and help those in trouble.  Then your light will shine out from the darkness and the darkness around you will be as bright as noon.” (Isaiah 58:10).  For Isaiah, “light” would shine as a result of good actions.  And as bearers of the Light of the World, they are truly our actions that will prove to our communities who Jesus really is.

What would our community, our city, look like if followers of Jesus became known for this again: caring for God’s creation, for fighting for all of human life – unborn and born – for peacemaking, for forgiving those who wrong us, for extending God’s love to all?

Let us be generous. Let us live life beside each other, united in God’s Spirit and serving the world God has made.  Let’s join together to live the words of St. Francis of Assisi:

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

words

For me, the dread word “evangelism” can quickly lead to a case of the heebee-geebees.  I have memories of knocking on doors, preparing 30-second versions of my conversion on 3×5 cards, and the hardest, (in my humble opinion), tracts.  “Let’s go witnessing” was the invitation that left me cold and cringing, awkwardly fishing for excuses as to why I just couldn’t do that tonight.

It was scary stuff.

For too many years this was my only view of evangelism.  It was about words – telling someone something.

I’m not degrading the importance of words.  It is simply that for years, my understanding of “sharing the gospel” had exclusively to do with words:  saying the right things, telling people about sin and Jesus’ death and forgiveness and heaven and the sinner’s prayer.

Words.

And I was terrible at it.

I was afraid to approach people on the street, in airplanes, the grocery store, school and start talking about Jesus.  Brutally honest?  When I did summon the necessary courage, I mostly ended up talking about church.

Have you been there, or am I the only one?  My pride and a slightly-underdeveloped spidey-sense tell me it’s not just me.

But the good news is this:  sharing Jesus is more than words.  A world remains outside our church needing to know the God who loves them beyond imaginations, to see as well as hear about Jesus.  We, Christ’s body, can rediscover that fully sharing the Gospel includes speaking the hope of Jesus, but more importantly, it means the giving of our lives to those God loves.  It has been said, “Preach the gospel at all times; when necessary, use words.”

What a statement when Christians in business hold themselves to the highest ethical standards; when teachers are known for the love they have toward students; when we stand against child slavery, ethnic cleansing, and the destruction of God’s created beauty; when we honor the poor; when our “friends without homes” are fed; when life is sacred from conception to death; when the stranger and enemy become, like the story of the good Samaritan, our neighbor.

There’s something powerful about letting the Gospel permeate us so completely that our actions preach more than our words.

Matthew puts it like this:  “Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.” (5:16)

they like jesus

but not the church...

I’m disturbed.

Ask anyone on the street:  What do you think about God?  What do you think about Jesus?  What do you think about Spirituality?

Then ask them:  What do you think about Christians?  The Church?  Christianity?

I’ll bet we’d find that people – from all walks of life, religious and irreligious (with the exception of Bill Maher, perhaps) – have a positive reaction to God, immensely respect Jesus, even practice some sort of Spirituality.

But Christian changes everything.  Descriptives emerge:  bigotted, intolerant, homophobic, subculture, controlling, hate.

How in the world did we change the world to the point that the world likes Jesus (at least in their limited understanding, but like him nonetheless they do) but can’t stand His followers?  Certainly there are wrong perceptions, but the fact remains that perceptions shape people’s realities.  And as Christians, we’ve given more than enough fodder for people’s negative perceptions to become reality.

The question for us is not necessarily how to change their perceptions, but how to change how we shape those perceptions.

In other words, regardless of what narrow (and I mean this positively, not negatively) beliefs we have, how can we communicate love to our world.

More importantly, how can we communicate God’s love to God’s world.

Because as much as people may like Jesus…

…Jesus likes them more.

walking portland

Tonight we encountered the most creative panhandling I’ve come across.  Andy, Petey and I were walking around downtown Portland, looking for a place to eat dinner, when this young guy (interestly enough, dressed pretty fashionably), reaches out and asks:

You have some change?  Because the bar doesn’t take shiny rocks and shells.

Seriously.

That almost made me want to give him some cash for his sheer creativity.

floyd’s coffee

Floyd's Coffee Shop, Portland OR

This morning never really started.

My Blackjack II running Windows Mobile 6 decided that when its time zone changed, every appointment in my calendar would also be set back 3 hours.

That translates to several rude 4:00am awakenings to shut off my phone telling me to wake up to go to class.  Needless to say, Andy Sikora is no fan of my phone.

Not only that, but a friend in Spokane decided to call me at 7:30am Eastern Time, waking me again at 4:30am Pacific Time.  And I got at least one text message from a person who shall remain nameless at 5:30am.

So, already not being a morning person, finally waking about 6:15am, I was in serious need of coffee.

Enter Floyd’s Coffee.

I’m not exactly certain how good their coffee is because I was in no fashion an unbiased consumer at 6:55am.  I needed a shot of caffeine.  I needed a large coffee.

Now, I am no coffee drinker.  I prefer chai.  But I needed it straight from the drip, thick and stimulating.

And it was good.

Floyd’s Coffee.

God bless Floyd.

leaving on a jet plane

Well, my wife and kids just dropped me off at the Ft. Lauderdale airport for a week in Portland, OR.  Since we just moved from the Pacific NW and are still living out of boxes, I had to dig out long-sleeved shirts and a jacket for the trip.  Right now it’s 90F and muggy in south FL; it’s about 60F in Portland.

I’ll be spending the next week back on campus at George Fox Seminary, about a third of the way through the first semester of my second year, overloading my brain with great material, discussion and all-around good people.  I expect to return exhausted from the whirlwind of 8-to-5 classes.

Here I go…

new firefox blog add-ons

As I’m finishing up some homework, I’m trying out a new feature in the latest Firefox – 3.0.3.  It’s quite cool even on first use – it syncs up with my blog and allows posting without pulling up a new window or tab.  It just appears as a pane at the bottom of my page.  It’s called ScribeFire and you can get it for free here.  Thanks to all the open-source programming junkies out there.

the hopeful way

John 14:3-7

Jesus said to his disciples, “If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

I was struck today by yesterday’s Anglican lectionary reading in honor of Saint Remigius, who apparantly effected the conversion of France in the late 5th Century.

The passage above, from John 14, is a familiar one, no doubt.  I can remember many times as a teenager hearing these words, “I am the way, the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.” and thinking how dark and foreboding they were.  They sent chills up and down my spine and imbibed me with an incredible sense of urgent fear.  Those words did not relay hope to me, instead serving as a warning to the world and the wayward:  if you want to get to heaven, you have to believe in Jesus.

Not only were these words a warning, but I was taught to use them in defense of Christianity.  This was the ultimate Trump card: if you’re not following Jesus, you’re not on your way to heaven.

But this morning, reading them in context with the verses before them, they exuded something new:  not fear, not urgency, not coercion, but hope.  These are words Jesus directed to his disciples, not in an effort to convince them to believe in him, nor to use as weapons to convert the heathen, but to assure them that they would live with Jesus forever – that he would never forsake them.

Jesus begins talking about leaving the disciples for a time, making ready a place for them, and then tells them they know the way to reach him.  Thomas, fearfully and perhaps urgently blurts out, “we don’t know where you are going; how can we know the way?!?“

It is in this context that Jesus speaks these well-known (and often ripped-from-context) words.  If we listen, we may very well hear the hope he offers, spoken through perhaps a wide smile, maybe accompanied by his own kind laughter:  “Why, Thomas, I am the way!  And the truth, and the life!  I am the way to my Father.“  He’s assuring his friends that they’re OK, that they don’t need to live fearfully, that because they know Jesus (and by extension, the Father), they can offer this same hope – without coercion, guilt or fear – to the world.

These words are fresh.  There is no fear in Jesus, but hope.