GUNS, FEAR AND LOVE

Last year I was hanging out with a friend of mine. He told me that he had just registered for two handguns - one for his him and one for his wife.“Really?” I asked, a little surprised.“Absolutely.” He said confidently. “It makes us feel more safe.”Many of my friends are hunters and own guns to hunt. But I’m not sure buying guns for personal protection is the best thing. Perhaps looking back nearly 2,000 years will give us some insight into this.If anyone had cause to “keep and bear arms” it was the First Century Church. They lived in constant danger. They were considered by the Roman Empire to be seditious, because they did not give their allegiance to Caesar and the Empire. As a result they were routinely executed. It would have made sense for them to be ready to fight, and strike back against those who were intent on destroying them.Curiously enough they did not fight back at all. In fact, they did just the opposite. Many early Christians decided to pursue peace at all costs, and were even willing to give their life for it. This attitude is seen in Paul’s instruction to the church. He wrote about how they should respond to their enemies, those who did evil to them and those who persecuted them.Paul told the Church, “Do not repay anyone evil for evil … live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge … If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink ... Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12.17-20 ©NIV).Those who read Paul’s letter to the Roman Church, the enemy was not someone on the other side of an ocean, someone you only read about, or heard others speak of. The enemy was the Roman soldier who had arrested, imprisoned or killed your family and friends. For the Christians in Rome, the enemy was the political and military leaders of the Empire.Even still, Paul was insistent. For every act of hate, evil, violence, or persecution repay it with love, kindness, peace, and good. This leaves little room for the use of weapons.Since that night when my friend told me had had registered for two guns, I have heard a number of people share similar stories. Buying guns to “feel safe,” to “defend ourselves in case anything happens” and wanting to “feel more secure.”Beneath these stated desires lies the reality of fear - fear of what might happen or could happen in our dangerous, unpredictable world. In what was a very dangerous world, Paul was clear as to how the people of God respond to the threat of violence and evil.In light of this, and in light of our fear with which we live, perhaps we should ask ourselves these questions:Will fear lead us to overcome evil with good?Will fear lead us to live at peace with everyone?Will fear lead us to refrain from taking revenge?Will fear lead us to love and care for our enemies?The answer to all of these questions is “no.” If we are to take the words of Scripture seriously it would do us well to stop and consider what it will take for us to live out Paul’s instruction in 21^st Century America. Some may think this is a bit naïve. Perhaps.But so often the instructions in the Bible seem to be really naïve. With all of it’s talk about loving your enemies, praying for those who persecute you and doing good in response to evil it appears to be the kind of faith that could lead to one getting pushed around, tread upon and even killed.Yep.And that’s exactly the upside down nature of the Bible and the Kingdom of God. We have been so thoroughly drenched in the ideals of our country, that we have trouble imagining a way of living differently in the midst of it.The only thing that will lead us to live this way is the love of God, which happens to be the very thing that drives our fear. Carrying a gun for protection will ultimately not drive out the fear that caused us to buy one in the first place.The early church understood this idea. St. Justin said, “… we who were filled with war, and slaughter, and wickedness, have each throughout the earth changed our weapons of war - our swords into plowshares, and our spears into tools for tilling the soil - and we cultivate piety, righteousness, generosity, faith, and hope, which we have from the Father Himself through Him who was crucified.”In the face of imminent threat they chose to abandon the very thing that seemingly could have kept them safe. And it was not because he was ignorant to the threat of violence and death. Elsewhere, St Justin said, “… in order not lie nor deceive our examiners, we willingly die confessing Christ.”What is striking about St. Justin’s words is not just the commitment to pursue peace, but the total and complete absence of fear. It is this absence that should speak volumes to us today.In God’s Kingdom it’s about our willingness to serve and love. It’s about living without fear – even without the fear of death itself. And if we live without the fear of death, then no gun will scare us. Which means that guns, and those who carry them, will lose their power over us.Then, just maybe, we will be able to respond to those who do evil as Paul instructed. Maybe we will finally be known as those who would “willingly die” to bring about peace, and those who are committed to cultivating “piety, righteousness, generosity, faith, and hope."

A THOUGHT AT THE BEGINNING OF THE NEW YEAR ...

Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? (Matthew 6:26 ©NIV)

A DEFINITION OF ADVENT

A beautiful reflection on Advent as we prepare to light the Christ Candle:

Advent

The house lights go off and the footlights come on. Even the chattiest stop chattering as they wait in darkness for the curtain to rise. In the orchestra pit, the violin bows are poised. The conductor has raised his baton. 

 

In the silence of a midwinter dusk, there is far off in the deeps of it somewhere a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen. 

 

You walk up the steps to the front door. The empty windows at either side of it tell you nothing, or almost nothing. For a second you catch a whiff of some fragrance that reminds you of a place you’ve never been and a time you have no words for. You are aware of the beating of your heart.

 

The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.

 

The Salvation Army Santa Claus clangs his bell. The sidewalks are so crowded you can hardly move. Exhaust fumes are the chief fragrance of the air, and everybody is as bundled up against any sense of what all the fuss is really about as they are bundled up against the windchill factor.

 

But if you concentrate just for an instant, far off in the deeps of you somewhere you can feel the beating of your heart. For all its madness and lostness, not to mention your own, your can hear the wold itself holding its breath.

 

- Frederick Buechner, Whistling In the Dark: A Doubter's Dictionary, pages 2-3

RECOVERING THE PLOT OF CHRISTMAS

There are times when the story of Christmas feels forced or contrived. Sure, we can say “Jesus is the Reason for the Season.” And he is, but why do we feel the Christmas story needs so much extra dressing?

If it’s really that compelling of a story then we ought to be confident that it is one that can stand on its own. But year after year we prove that it doesn’t. Christmas is tied to stories, traditions and rituals; many of which have nothing to do with the story of Jesus.

This makes me wonder: If the story of Jesus, born of a Virgin, is so amazing then why is it that we only reflect on it once a year, and when we do barely give it a passing glance?

Perhaps it’s because we have lost the plot, and we have lost the plot because we have lost the backstory. When this happens the story no longer makes sense and is barely interesting anymore – any old story can take its place, even one that is not as good, because at least we can understand the plot.

It’s time for us to recover the story of Christmas, and as why the first Christmas was so miraculous that the angels felt compelled to sing? To do so, we have to begin with the backstory. As Robert McKee points out, “… we do not pull characters out of a void.” We explored this and more at Denver Community Church on the second Sunday of Advent.

+ Click here to enjoy the teaching.

GOD IS HERE?

There are times when it feels like the promises contained in Scripture mock us. Moments when the words intended to bring us comfort seem remote, detached and distant. Friday morning in Newtown, Connecticut was one of those times.

On Friday afternoon I stood outside my children’s elementary school with hundreds of other parents. In the midst of small talk about what we were doing for Christmas break, all the while, there was a somber heaviness. On that day the world witnessed unspeakable evil juxtaposed with the Season of Advent.

A Season in which the people of God remember, anticipate and celebrate the fulfillment of God’s promise to be here with us. That in the person of Jesus the long hoped for renewal, redemption and restoration had come. This is what Matthew spoke of in his gospel when he quoted the prophet Isaiah.

Matthew wrote, “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”)” (Matthew 1.22,23 ©NIV). Matthew was eager to point out to his readers that in the person of Jesus we can confidently say God is here, that surely God is with us.

But on Friday, for many people, the feeling was more like, “God is here? Really? Where exactly?”

When I heard the news of Friday my gut response was to say, “God, why?” My heart wondered where God was in all of this. Many people wondered the same thing. Sometimes it is hard to mesh the words of Scripture with our world.

One commentator suggested that it was precisely because God was not there that this heinous act happened. Governor Mike Huckabee claimed we should not be surprised to see this kind of violence since we have removed God from our schools and our society. His sentiment is to say, “God is NOT here.” If that is the case, then it surely can explain the existence of pure evil that we saw displayed on Friday.

However, thinking like that of Governor Huckabee suggests that we somehow have the power to remove God from our schools and our society. This kind of God is quite small, weak and impotent - one that is dictated by the mere whims of humanity. This is not the God of whom Matthew spoke.

Matthew spoke of the Almighty God fully embodied and revealed in the person of Jesus. So much so that he claimed he was Emmanuel; God with us. He is here not in spite of the pain, nor did he come to explain it away. God is here in the midst of our suffering.

The hope of Advent is that God responded to the suffering of humanity by entering into it with us. He did not stand outside of it and look in with a wincing face and hope that everything would somehow work out. Nor did he see humans who removed him from their schools and societies and say, “Well fine, then, have it your way!” Not at all.

God saw the mess that humanity had gotten itself into, and his heart broke. The writer of Genesis wrote that when God saw the evil hearts of humankind his response was one of pain and a grieving heart. God’s pain was the same pain Adam and Eve experienced as a result of their sinful choice to eat the fruit in the garden. Which raises the question, “What kind of God allows himself to experience the same pain as mere mortals?”

The answer?

The same one who willfully chose to enter into this world and stand alongside us in our misery. This is the God who is not a stranger to suffering, but one who is well acquainted with it. In the person of Jesus, we learn of a God who took upon himself our shame, our wounds and our burdens. He is the Heavenly Father who also lost a child to horrible violence, and weeps with the parents of those children killed in Newtown - one whose pain is as real as ours.

To speak of Emmanuel is to speak of a God who is found in the midst of suffering. Try as you might you cannot remove him from schools, society or anywhere. For wherever there is pain, agony or heartache there God will be also. He is a God who suffers with us.

This enables us to say, “God is here.”

When we utter these words, somehow the promises of Scripture seem a little less distant. They turn from mockery to comfort. What we do not need in these moments is a long and deep explanation of why this happened.

Too often in our attempt to move on we try to comprehend the incomprehensible. In the midst of the media frenzy, the conflicting reports and clamor of social media the God who is with us whispers words comfort saying, “I know your pain, and I am in this with you.”

Indeed. God is here.

These are words we can sit with; words that will sustain us in the darkest moments. At times we will struggle to believe them, and other moments they will be for us our surest salvation. All the while we know that God is with us. For now, we ache and cry out together, “How long, O Lord?”

Each time we do, we wait expectantly for an answer - longing for the time when we will not speak of our wounds and those who caused them, but will speak of our wounds and the God of grace who healed them. Our cry is one filled with faith, for we know the story of Jesus does not end in agony, but in glory.

And so, armed with this hope: May you, my brothers and sisters, see the day when God will at last restore, renew and redeem all things – whether things in heaven or on earth. The day when all things will be made right, and even our greatest moments of suffering will be transformed into glory.

And may we always long for and hope for that day when the God who suffered with us and for us will have made his dwelling among us, and we will stand alongside one another and exclaim, “God is here!”

WHAT LIFE IN A CAVE CAN TEACH US ABOUT ADVENT

Imagine living in hundreds of feet below the surface of the earth in a cave, with only one dim light source, no way of telling time and no human contact for sixty days. Beyond the feeling of claustrophobia that could set in – it sounds awful. Damp, dark, strange creatures lurking about.

Yet, in 1962 this is exactly what Michel Siffre did. He descended into a cave outside of Nice, France because he wanted to see what would happen to a person who was cut off from any notion of time. Decades later Joshua Foer interviewed Siffre about the time he spent in the cave. He reported:

“Very quickly Siffre’s memory deteriorated. In the dreary darkness, his days melded into one another and became one continuous, indistinguishable blob. Since there was nobody to talk to, and not much to do, there was nothing novel to impress itself upon his memory. There were no chronological landmarks by which he could measure the passage of time. At some point he stopped being able to remember what happened even the day before. His experience in isolation had turned him into EP. As time began to blur, he became effectively amnesic. Soon, his sleep patterns disintegrated. Some days he’d stay awake for thirty-six straight hours, other days for eight—without being able to tell the difference. When his support team on the surface finally called down to him on September 14, the day his experiment was scheduled to wrap up, it was only August 20 in his journal. He thought only a month had gone by. His experience of time’s passage had compressed by a factor of two.” Excerpt From: Foer, Joshua. Moonwalking with Einstein.

What Siffre experienced was not life apart from time, but life apart from rhythm. He was still living in time, but had no way to measure it. What he learned is humans need rhythms, as they are a way of measuring time. It’s no surprise then that rhythm is woven into the fabric of creation.

In Genesis 1 the writer speaks of how God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years” (Gen 1:14, NIV). The ancient used these signs in the sky as a gauge for measuring time. But they did not stop there. They learned that anything that has a constant and consistent rhythm can be used to measure time, and ever since we have been able to measure time more accurately.

Now we measure time according the frequency of a cesium atom. We call the rhythm of this atom the atomic clock which ticks tick 9,192,631,770 every second. It is so accurate it can gain or lose a second  every 100 million years. You may find all this to be interesting or boring, but it does raise a question.

Why is it that humans have such a fascination with measuring and tracking time? Why, when Siffre descended into a cave for sixty days did his mind get mushy?

Perhaps it is because we all have a rhythm inside us. Heart beat, breathing rate, brain waves, sleep patterns – all these things go on without our being fully aware of it. Something inside us is keenly aware of time ... all the time. Take away the rhythms woven into the fabric of creation, and it makes an impact on our rhythms.  So what happens, then, what happens when we are out of rhythm? When we fail to stop, slow down and allow ourselves to simply be?

Yesterday a friend said to me, “I cannot believe it’s almost Christmas. Where has time gone?” We all hear comments like this – maybe it’s because we live our lives much the way Siffre did in that cave.

Many of us have no rhythms. These days, most people I know move fast, stay busy, work too much, sleep too little and have an inability to stand still or enjoy silence. It's no wonder we lose track of time. And our maddening pace only gets worse during the Advent Season.

We gorge ourselves on Thanksgiving, sleep off the tryptophan induced coma and then … go! Parties, lights, decorations, gifts, wrapping, family Christmas card, egg nog, get the tree and the list goes on. By the time Christmas Day rolls around we finally stop and crash into it wondering what just happened.

All the while we fail to see that Advent is a season given to us. A time that invites us back into rhythm, to slow down, to measure time so that we can both remember and look ahead. Perhaps this year we can receive the gift of Advent. We can allow ourselves to hear its rhythm and know where we are in time.

How will you live according to the rhythm of Advent this year? How will you slow down? Stop? Be still? Be Silent? Be? - so that you can remember and long for the hope that has come and will come again.

IT'S NOT WHAT ... IT'S HOW

I have a high opinion of the Church. Sure, there is a lot of news and research about the Church in America that strikes the doomsday chord. We need to and should pay attention to this. However, this news need not cause reactive fear; we can see it as an opportunity. And this is where my optimism comes in.

I believe the Church is perfectly suited to address and meet the needs – no matter how big – in our world. And there are many who believe the same thing. The trouble that I see more and more today, is not that people are unwilling to respond to the needs in our world, it’s that many people don’t know how.

They don’t know where to start, what to do or how to go about it. Perhaps what’s needed now, more than ever, is not more theory or conjecture or reasoning about why we should live as the hands and feet of Jesus. Maybe we need more people speaking of how we can live - right now - as the presence of Jesus in our world.

What would happen if more men and women began living like Jesus because they have been taught how to do it? Chances are we would see more needs met and more lives changed. This would speak so loudly that those who only speak of theory may be compelled to act at last.

So, how can we learn how?

A few months ago my good friends Dave Runyon and Jay Pathakwrote a book called the Art of Neighboring that addresses how to love your neighbor. They believe that being a neighbor is not just something you are, but something you do. Imagine if we started doing something this simple.

Dave and Jay share their experiences as neighbors, and through this teach what they have learned about how to live like Jesus. Every word in the book provides insights, ideas and resources making the "how" tangible and doable. This book is a needed resource for us today. Its practical teaching is bound to connect with anyone who loves Jesus, and wants to learn how to show his love in greater ways in his or her everyday world.

So how do you find this book? Easy.

Paperback

Kindle

iBooks

AudioBook

And may you learn, the art of being a neighbor.

A WRITER'S REST

The other day a friend of mine reminded me that I have not been blogging very regularly. She’s right. I have not. And there is a reason; one of which I am keenly aware – I’m taking a brief rest.

One thing I have discovered in my life is that the learning curve I am on is always curving. I used to believe there were seasons for learning, but this is not true. Learning is a constant, and the difference is how sharp the learning curve is. Over the last several months the curve has been brutal, and beautiful as a result.

As many of you know I have been working on a book that is due to be published in Fall 2013. This little fact is directly tied to my steep learning curve. I learned a lot about the craft of writing, about the publishing process and what makes words, sentences, paragraphs, pages and chapters work. But there was something else I learned.

Writing is soul work.

With each word I typed I had an overwhelming sense I was not just spilling information on a page for others to soak up. Rather, I was engaging in a spiritual exercise that required all of me – heart, mind, body and soul. The task of writing was more demanding than I ever imagined, and tired me out more than I expected.

Several weeks ago I turned the manuscript into my publisher, and the tiredness hit me hard. It is a good kind of tired. It came with a sense of satisfaction knowing that I have been doing good, rewarding work. But I was still tired.

Not long after I handed in my manuscript, I went to Southern California with my wife. One day were on the beach with a new friend of ours who is an author. I asked her questions about writing, books and life as an author. In the midst of this she said, “A friend of mine just told me that I need to rest. To literally stop writing and everything … for a year.”

What she didn’t know is that while she was relating what her friend said to her, she was really speaking directly to me. I needed to stop. To rest. To refresh. Not necessarily for a year, but for a time.

Many people have kindly inquired about my lack of blogging, and wondered why there has been so little of it. I guess it all boils down to those words on that beach. I need to stop and rest. In the next few weeks I will resume my blogging. And I am confident the sun will go one rising and setting with or without a new post. Until that time, may you too find rest.