So after our Discipleship Conference last night, I came home to watch the TV that had accumulated for me on the ol’ TiVo. One of the things I grab is ABC’s World News; have since before Jennings went off the air. The story that caught my eye was churches in Clacakamas County, Oregon banding together to promote marriage as a positive for the community. Here’s a quick rundown of the concept:

• None of the pastors there will marry you if you haven’t been through the counseling program.
• The premarital counseling program is designed to have the affianced confront the implications of their commitment before they enter into it.
• After marriage, support is there from the community—including community date night, where babysitting services are provided to allow parents to have some meaningful time together outside of the whole parenting thing.

See, what it is for these folks is a commitment to marriage by the community and marriage in the community. Within reasonable bounds, the couples confess things to each other with an eye towards making things work. Clackamas County’s divorce rate has noticeably dropped as a result, which has to be viewed as a positive. [Before you argue that some divorces are necessary, please note that this program is essentially designed to sniff out those truly incompatible and have them realize this prior to making the lifelong commitment.]

Now, this relates back to the discussion in the Discipleship Conference from earlier, which covered David on the lam from Saul and how the church responded to his desperation. I won’t belabor the example, but the central point of the message was that Ahimelech provided bread and a sword—sustenance for David and his men, and a means in which to engage his problems. And truly, that’s all the church is supposed to do—meet people’s immediate, desperate need and equip them to face their problems head-on. If we can simply do that, we’ve met a major commitment we have to the surrounding community.

We’d like to pretend, though, that all these desperate people are outside the church doors on Sunday, and we know that’s just not true. Sometime, we’re even the desperate ones, all but wailing to reach out and just blurt out our problems, but checked by the twin pillars of Pride and Fear of Rejection from doing so. Our charge as a church body is to be as Samson to those pillars and push them down by fostering a community where we can feel safe in communicating these issues to each other. It is a daunting charge, to be sure, but one for which Jesus gave no less than His life.

Okay, so I’m in the second week of Disciple, and all the readings this week are about God’s power and majesty and glory. Which, well, I get all that. I mean, I am the guy who goes into manned spaceflight because I believe in supporting man’s innate need to explore God’s universe. But man … I struggle with wonder. I definitely take it all for granted a lot of the time.

It’s my nature to focus on imperfections, to suggest corrections and push for improvements. The thing that makes me good at what I do for a living also, well, stunts a lot of things. And then I have this nasty tendency to focus on the problems in front of me to the detriment of focus on anything else—amusing, because I’m also easily distracted—and, as a result, let that thing consume. Often, that’s work. None of which is really healthy, even if it may be good in some sense.

So I struggle with wonder. How do you overcome that struggle if you share it?

Last week, I was thinking to myself, “Hey, cool! I can blog about Disciple Bible study!” But then the more I thought about our covenant, the less I decided that I could do it—try as I might, I’d probably not be able to separate other people’s stories and shared discussions from my own, and I really want to respect that covenant. Just know that I’m terribly excited about spending the next 30 weeks or so in shared study with a dozen or so fellow believers that represent a cross-section of my church body, and that I hope to be blessed by it and to bless others as I can.

I think that Greg Boyd is right: Christians are called to be personally pacifistic, but governments are sometimes instruments of God’s judgement here on Earth. [Admittedly, this position weakens my anti-death penalty stance. I will have to think on that some more.]

While the New Testament calls on followers of Jesus to love, bless and serve our enemies rather than use violence against them, it also acknowledges that God uses the sword-wielding capacity of governments to keep sin in check. For example, four verses after Paul tells disciples to love and serve enemies and to leave all vengeance to God (Rom. 12:17-21), he goes on to say that God orchestrates governments to exact vengeance on wrongdoers (Rom. 13:4). In other words, he’s saying that God will use governments to do things God explicitly forbids disciples of Jesus to do.

[Emphasis mine.]

I wished that I’d read this before Sunday morning, when I had to introduce a musical arrangement of Saint Francis of Assisi’s peace prayer. I struggled to make that point in my introduction, but I guess I got it across. And then, of course, my pastor would mention Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus during his sermon [he's been preaching out of Acts for most of the last two months], but only in the second service. In my introduction in both services, I said, “We’re called to love our enemies. That means that we’re called to love Osama bin Laden, as difficult as that might be for us to do. It was difficult for me to do six years ago, and it’s just as difficult today.”

Of course, since I brought up Paul, you can probably see the parallel: Saul, the former persecutor of the splinter sect of Jews, suddenly repents. Brothers and sisters, what a joy it would be, and what a powerful witness for Christ that would be made, if Osama bin Laden, a man responsible for the deaths of thousands around the world, suddenly repented of his sins and confessed Christ. Would we have a hard time believing his faithfulness? Absolutely—but given that we don’t know the hearts of any around us, we have no real reason to doubt any other more or less. And if we Christians accepted him as one of our own? That, too, would be a powerful witness. Certainly, he would have to account for his crimes, as we all do, but we could, through Christ’s love through us, come to love him as a brother.

That would be a rather large wave in life’s ocean that resulted from the Cornerstone being laid into it.

Not that I expect any of this, nor that he deserves it, but that we all deserve death and that none of us deserve heaven nor the grace that gets us there.

Part of the reason that I’m working to prepare my Sunday school lessons instead of just riffing is that I get lost so easily down some rabbit trail. Now, if you’ve had a conversation with me that’s gone longer than, oh, five minutes, this doesn’t surprise you—I have an associative mind, and I’m a spastic thinker. The goal with writing all this stuff down is to have more … ummm, focus.

Today, I finished my series on relationships. Next week, I get my new set of 7th graders, and I only keep one rising 8th grader—probably my most regular attendee. Poor kid, he’s gonna be stuck hearing all my old stories yet again. But as I look back on today, I like how it went. I juxtaposed Proverbs 31:10-31 with Ephesians 5:22-31. We talked through all the anachronistic things in the Old Testament text, and then we distilled it down the key bits in 28-31. Then, shifting to Paul, I said, “Now, the mainstream media loves to lampoon folks who quote from this text, but they always seem to do it with the first part of it, which does sound old-fashioned and outmoded without the context of the remainder of the passage or knowing what Christ’s sacrifice means.” Of course, this is the famous “submission” passage, and in today’s post-feminist culture, that doesn’t sit well with most folks.

I exhorted the kids to consider it in terms of mutual self-sacrifice. I asked them to consider what happens when, in a friendship, one person or the other acts selfishly. What does that provoke within us? “Man, he’s being selfish. I should be, too!” As a result, the friendship typically falters. But in a marriage—which I reminded them was a lifelong commitment between two people that could span decades—I asked them to think of the implications of selfishness. “If a friendship ends, okay, that happens. There wasn’t much commitment there, was there? But marriage is a whole other thing.”

I was terribly uncomfortable in teaching about relationships—I find myself a mediocre friend at best and a horrible mate. I’d argue that every one of my romantic relationships—which, admittedly, don’t number that high—have failed largely because of my selfishness. I felt like a failure talking about these things, but I have great role models. As I told the kids, my folks have been married 38 years; my mom’s folks were married 47 before Papa died, and my dad’s folks were married 64 years before Pops died. That’s nearly 150 years of marriage. I’m quite sure that they haven’t all been easy years—hell, I know that they haven’t been—but they were committed ones. What a great standard they’ve set for Doug and me.

I’ve started a new category, Reading in Reverse, where hopefully I’ll be good about writing about my teaching. [The name comes from the idea that you use a mirror to read backwards-scripted text, and the Bible's lessons are certainly backwards to our human nature.] I won’t promise to write every week, but I’ll try to write as often as I feel led.

Lastly, an addendum: many of my Presbyterian friends linked to John Piper’s essay on the Minnesota bridge collapse, and I’ve kept silent on that. I know what Piper’s getting at, but I disagree with his worldview. I’m far more aligned with how Greg Boyd views the collapse. But then most of my Presbyterian friends know that I’m a not-so-closeted Open Theist.

After muddling through several Sunday school curricula over the past 10 months or so, I’ve decided to simply write my own. I want to do it as a rolling two-year curriculum, as I teach 7th and 8th grade Sunday school. My idea is that I can break it up into groupings, and the kids will get all of the curriculum at some point over the two years. Works in my head, anyway.

As we’re in summertime and the bulk of my class are 8th graders, I asked my kids what they wanted to study. Very quickly, they said, “Relationships!” I swore only on the inside—I am not the person to be talking on relationships. :chuckle: But they’ve made me do some digging, and that’s good. And then, thanks to Brannon McAllister, I came across this call to single men to reconsider the beauty they see in the single Christian women around them. I’m not 100% sure that I hold to everything in there, but it’s making me think …

How they’re doing this is really cool … got some excess cardboard boxes, so the kids are sleeping on the hard floor in our fellowship hall on and in the boxes. Soon, I’ll be doing the same. Well, other than the need to work on the server…

Lord help me, but I agreed to be a chaperone for the lock-in MUMC is doing in conjunction with 30 Hour Famine this weekend. Yeah, so I willingly agreed to not only do a lock-in—I haven’t chaperoned one in three years—but one where the kids won’t get to gorge on junk food? What are we thinking?

I’m taking my laptop up there to get stuff done in the middle of the night when the kids have crashed and server load will be low …

I guess this is what I get for not posting this, but … I want to note that I’m the cynical chump that came up with the “flair of the spirit” line that Stephen uses here in summation [and in titling]. Honestly, Stephen did a better job stripping the conversation that my cynical proclamation came from than I would have; I always have this preternatural need to give context clues for the discussion when, really, they aren’t necessary and serve to distract from the greater point being made.Okay, maybe Stephen came up with it first.

Derek Webb wrote about this in a song on his second album, I See Things Upside Down, “T-Shirts (What We Should Be Known For)” (which fits better sonically on his first record, but hey):

They’ll know us by the billboards that we make
Just turning God’s words to cheap clichés
Says “what part of murder don’t you understand?”
But we hate our fellow man
And point a finger at his grave

To be fair, we rely upon first impressions as a filtering mechanism, and its something that is ingrained in the way our brains work. But where we fail our fellow man is when we allow those first impressions to also be our last impression.

I’ve said too much [in publicly admitting what I'm doing for Lent] already, so let me just quote:

¹⁶“And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. ¹⁷But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, ¹⁸that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

— Mt. 6:16-18 (ESV)

Father, if I use Lent in the right way, my writing in this time should not be related to what is given up but what is gained. Any denial is simply done out of obedience and an understanding that we can never make the complete sacrifice Christ gave, but that some willful sacrifice on our part brings us ever closer to truly taking up our cross and following.

Repentance is what we need. [And what I needed earlier today was the strength to pull this verse set out and say, "It's not for me to say."]

Yeah, I notice that I do the bulk of my writing in the major parts of the liturgical calendar. I’m working on being better overall, but it’s hard for me, for whatever reason. I think part of my self-examination during Lent is for me to try to unpack why I don’t write this stuff out more often. I think I know some of it, and … well, I’ll explore that soon.