Friday, April 29, 2016

Share the Pain

Friday 4/29/2016 4:20 AM
I hear a number of Christians talking about what they call God’s perfect plan for their life. It often includes finding a perfect spouse who satisfies their every need, having a perfect family with cute, obedient children, having a perfect fulfilling job that pays well, and so on. Churches and pastors often feed into this view and suggest that, if you become a Christian and can find God’s perfect will for your life, all your troubles will disappear and your life will be wonderful. There are a lot of churches filled with parishioners that have that view and, at the same time, there are large numbers of people leaving the church when they discover that their troubles don’t all disappear.
Today I read these words by Rueben Job, “Eugene Peterson pinpoints the trouble with praying: We are often asked to respond in ways that we never intended when we first began to pray. It matters little where or in what century we are called to live out our Christian life. The witness of those who have gone before informs my own experience, telling me that we are often taken to places where we receive unwarranted accolades and to other places where we receive unwarranted suffering and pain. A disciple, one who chooses to be student and follower of Jesus, is not a ‘self-made person’ and is not on a personally designed journey. The key word in this theme is taken. Just as Jesus was taken into the wilderness after his baptism, so we are taken into the experiences of discipleship that we do not necessarily choose for our selves. We choose to follow Jesus and then Jesus chooses where we will go. It is that simple. The saving truth here is not that we are taken where we do not want to go; rather the saving truth is that we are not alone. There is One who leads us and goes with us. Jesus arose from baptism and ‘the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness’. But even there the angels (messengers of God) were with him and tended to his needs. While we may not choose the place to God, we can choose to remain with the One who sends us and there find comfort, companionship, grace, peace, and joy.”
In his book Seeking the Face of God, Gary Thomas addresses the same issue. “Those who have gone before us have left a clear witness: We may seek God or we may seek ease, but we cannot seek both. The road we travel is anything but easy. It is true that God loves us and has a wonderful plan for our lives, but it is equally true that the plan is often fraught with tension and uncertainty, and with emotional, spiritual, and physical pain.”
I believe that those within the family of faith need to represent the life we experience with God in a more realistic way. We need to share our own struggles, doubts, fears, and pain with others. This will accomplish two things; we will accurately represent the life of a believer as one who struggles with God and we will be able to encourage one another and share the pain and hurt that is such a big part of life. When we put on a happy face and build a façade that suggests that our lives are all wonderful we make people believe they could never be good enough to be a part of the church at large because their lives don’t measure up. In reality, we all struggle with our faith, we all experience pain and disappointment, and we all fail to live the life God calls us to live. What we need to share is the good news of the gospel; that God is loving and compassionate and does not leave us to wallow in the messiness of this world alone. He accompanies us through it all by embodying himself in the lives of other believers. It’s time the church becomes the hands, feet, and arms of love and compassion, seeking out those who are hurting and wrapping them with that love.

Friday, April 8, 2016

Peacemaking

Friday 3/25/2016 4:22 AM
Today I read these words of Henri Nouwen, “Peacemaking must be the primary focus of all political leaders, whether in or out of power. But the temptations to personal power are too intense to be overcome by our insistently self-centered egos. Therefore, the peace must be God’s peace, a peace that is freely available when we turn inwardly to Jesus. Jesus is the model of the ultimate peacemaker, always pointing to Abba as the ultimate source of peace, justice, goodness, mercy, love, and creativity. In order to claim peace, we must relinquish our own private agendas and let ourselves be claimed by God.”
I would argue that peacemaking must be not only the primary focus of political leaders, it should also be one of the primary foci of the Christian community. Too often we take our lead from the world and emulate its way of doing things as we interact within the church and with the world. It seems the evangelical church has become a big political machine, looking to protect the interests of the church and of Christians. It looks to restore “family values” using any means necessary and become messengers of hate and bigotry in the process. We focus on our rights being stripped away and seek to restore our society to the way it once was, a simpler, kinder time we remember from our childhood.
God’s call to me as a Christian is to seek justice for those who are oppressed and beaten down, for those without a voice. I am to give up my own rights and seek for the restoration of rights for the disenfranchised in our society. We need to step away from the seats of power and prestige to make way for those who have been too long ignored.

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Am I Significant or an Accident?

Tuesday 4/5/2016 4:44 AM
A couple of years ago I read the book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, by Max Tegmark. Tegmark suggests that our universe is simply a mathematical structure and living things, including humans, are nothing more than extremely complicated braids in the fabric of this structure. At the end of the book Tegmark addresses the issue of human significance or insignificance. After all, if we are nothing but a braid in the fabric of reality why are we necessary or perhaps even important in the grand scheme of things?
Tegmark writes, “It was the cosmic vastness that made me feel insignificant to start with. Yet those grand galaxies are visible and beautiful to us – and only to us. It’s only we who give them any meaning, making our small planet the most significant place in our entire observable Universe. If we didn’t exist, all those galaxies would be just a meaningless and gigantic waste of space.” It was this same kind of feeling that led Lee Strobel to become a Christian, which he documents in his book The Case for a Creator. Strobel looked at the odds of having a planet in the habitable zone of a star, tilted at the perfect angle allowing for even warming and cooling of the planet, with a moon at exactly the right distance so that a total eclipse of the sun allows us to verify the general theory of relativity, placed in a galactic arm in such a way that we can see other galaxies through our telescopes, etc. He concluded that the odds were too small to have it all be an accident and, consequently, came to the conclusion that a being outside our universe must have made it. Tegmark claims we give the Universe meaning; Strobel would argue that our meaning and significance comes from being an intentional creation of God.
Tegmark goes on to suggest that at our stage of human development we have the technology to self-destruct or to seed the cosmos with life. He then writes, “If we end up going the life route rather than the death route, then in a distant future, our cosmos will be teeming with life that all traces back to what we do here and now. I have no idea how we’ll be thought of, but I’m sure that we won’t be remembered as insignificant.” I wonder how Tegmark gets from the viewpoint that he is nothing but a complicated braid in a mathematical structure to having the need to have significance? The two viewpoints seem incompatible to me. I think I would like to sit down over coffee with him to discuss his views so I could better understand.
Like Strobel, I believe the universe and everything in it was created and is sustained by a personal entity, which I call God, who is outside of our known universe. He is a relational being and desires to be in relationship with everything he has made, including me. Humans made my car and it runs best if I change the oil regularly, perform routine maintenance, and follow other suggestions made in the owner’s manual. Similarly, my life works best if I live in a healthy relationship with God, with others, and with the whole of creation. If I separate myself from God, live in conflict with others, or exploit the environment in which I live, my life, and the lives of others are impoverished as a result. If I want to experience life to the fullest degree I need to acknowledge God, look to the needs of others, and protect the environment around me.
In the book Abba’s Child, Brennan Manning writes, “Living in the awareness of the risen Jesus is not a trivial pursuit for the bored and lonely or a defense mechanism enabling us to cope with the stress and sorrow of life. It is the key that unlocks the door to grasping the meaning of existence. All day and every day we are being reshaped into the image of Christ. Everything that happens to us is designed to this end. Nothing that exists can exist beyond the pale of his presence, nothing is irrelevant to it, nothing is without significance in it.” While I have no more evidence of the existence of God than Tegmark has of the evidence of his Universe as a mathematical structure, I certainly do not have the same struggle he has with my own significance and with the significance of others. From my perspective we are all made and loved by God, which gives us ultimate significance.