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.

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?

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.

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.

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 …

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 …

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.

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.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve had my trifecta of Christmas celebrations: an Andrew Peterson-led retelling of the true tall tale of Christ through his Behold the Lamb of God; Over the Rhine’s yearly Thursday night run to Nashville for a Christmas show at 3rd and Lindsley; and my church’s cantata. [I tried to get out of doing a solo, but I was asked to open us up with a rendition of "O Come, O Come Emmanuel". Agreeing to do it, we arranged it with antiphonal bass chords on the piano as my sole accompaniment, and on Saturday, Katherine (our choir director) looked at me and said, "What about Latin?" So I sang it in Latin. I think it went okay, and I hope that my elocution was decent. You never know when someone in the crowd knows the dead language!]

But after all that—and it usually all comes within the first two weeks of the month, as it did this year—I’m … well, kinda spent and left feeling that the Christ child has already come. Well, indeed He has, a couple millenia past … but I always feel a bit like He comes every year to remind us of His redemption for us, individually and corporately. [Which is good, because I surely need it. Every hour.]

And I guess there’s things going on that I really can’t talk about, too, that contribute: work things, friend things. It’s all things that will be resolved for good—of these I am sure—but I guess I’m worn down a bit as we approach the traditional remembering time. I’m sure that some of you feel the same way. But all things do work together for good, in their own ways. Why? Our Jesus is in the redeeming business.

Our local paper (although it is an AP article) began its coverage in todays paper by saying “In just about every communtiy, a deadly shooting would have brought demands from civic leaders for tighter gun laws and better security, and the victims’ loved ones would have lashed out at the gunman’s family or threatened to sue. But that’s not the Amish way.”

Replace Amish with Christian. That is what our witness to the world should be like. People are watching and we should act in ways that should make their necks hurt from all the double takes. Like these isolated Amish, we should be modelling a new creation, a new way of living, that is so counter-intuitive, that everyone should be forced to take note.

Amen.

As we consecrated the new building, it was interesting to see old folks back again: previous pastors, former members, etc. I’m fairly sure that the third-to-last pastor set was someone who’d pastored my grandparents’ church down in Marion County [I need to confirm that with Mom]. Madison UMC has been a congregation since 1828; I am glad to be a small part of its tradition. I like being a part of older, smaller churches, as they tend to have a sense of history and can be relied upon to remember why we’re gathering together in the first place. Maybe this is my own bias against newer megachurches showing up, but I enjoy being reminded—regularly!—that church just ain’t about us: we gather together to give God glory and to make and nurture disciples for Jesus Christ. Yes, all of that can and should make us better people as we become better Christians, but that fruit is secondary.

Yeah, I’m settling in. It’s hard to believe that I’m nearing in on being there for a year now!

We are mistaken if we believe that freedom is the product of any government instituion. We are mistaken if we believe that any political leader has the ability to provide or deprive us freedom. We are mistaken if we believe that any government construct is the source or the ends of our freedom.

You can take what Josh says to the bank no matter where you lie in the political spectrum.

I know, I know, heresy: repackaging of the sacred text. But honestly, the Bible fits a writing pattern that doesn’t match many folks’ reading patterns. The whole of it is a bit intimidating—66 books! Centuries upon centuries! Lots of writers! Arcane language!—and it could stand some dissection. Of course, some might argue that would take the life out of it.

Just an idle thought on a Wednesday before I run off to chancel choir…

I almost wrote a long rant about how Joel Osteen is what’s wrong with Christianity in America today.

Then I realized that I’m what’s wrong with Christianity. And the world. I loathe my self-rightousness, my unbelief and my callousness, my contempt and unlove for others. There are things I disagree with about Mr. Osteen’s ministry and his book, things that I think are detrimental to the growth of the kingdom, but I don’t know that it’s my place to vigorously criticize him. Maybe instead I should be worried about how I am furthering God’s kingdom, and how He has called me to impact my world.

David goes on to develop this point, but I did take away this thought after reading that [and, for once, coming to a full stop: there’s certainly a legitimate place for criticism, but when we, as Christians, become known more for our railings against those with whom we disagree—even when we see them as false prophets and are doing our Biblical duty to call them out—than we are for our meager works of faith, borne of a spirit of grace, humility, and servitude, then … then we’re really failing Christianity and the world.

Ripping others to shred is the easy thing; Kingdom work isn’t. Which are we called to do?

⁹Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. ¹⁰Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. ¹¹Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. ¹²Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. ¹³Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.

¹⁴Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. ¹⁵Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. ¹⁶Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be conceited. ¹⁷Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. ¹⁸If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. ¹⁹Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” ²⁰To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” ²¹Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

– Romans 12:9-21, English Standard Version.

I have written about Paul before, and I’ve been reluctant to bring it up too much because little good can truly come of it. Reading about it is understandably disheartening, no matter your involvement with the case.

If there is anything to be gained here—and I’m struggling to look for positives here—it might be that Paul’s long prison sentence will keep him from ever committing such crimes again and may also provide ministry opportunities for him to share the Gospel. I firmly believe that God forgives many things that we could never find it within ourselves to forgive, and it is my hope that Paul can share the Gospel of forgiveness in prison as he continues to work on the Gospel of sanctification.

Maybe it’s because I don’t share myself easily. I feel like I share with people I know but there is that conundrum of how do you get to know someone new without sharing first. I find that with new people I think that they don’t know me very well and so assume that they don’t want to or worse, assume they know me on the basis of a few casual encounters. (Of course, I guess by putting all this out here I’m allowing a few more people to know me better.) Maybe this is because I’ve had a couple of good friends for 15+ years and they have all the shorthand of my personality and history so there is so much about myself that I don’t have to explain or that they just “get” because of all of that history. They know me and maybe this is just what I’m missing with new people.

Maybe this problem is because I think everyone should be my best friend. And really, that’s just not possible. Sure you can have a lot of friends, an even wider circle of acquaintances but actual close friends? How many can one person realistically juggle? I think this is too much pressure on everyone involved. So then how do you catagorize the ones you have? I’ve not yet figured out how to be successful with this.

Now, if you go read the comments link from the first paragraph, you’ll see that I brought up Dunbar’s number, which is my pretty, shiny sociological concept of the moment. [Yes, I'm one of those "when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail" kind of people with new ideas.] But I also said this to Misty in an email I sent her later:

I hold to the belief set that, while grace covers our sins, it certainly doesn’t mean that we’re fully righteous. We get imputed righteousness in God’s eyes, but we’re still broken, screwed-up people. Yeah, we should be getting better every day, no longer slaves to sin and the law but to grace, but that’s a life-long process.

The consequences of all that is that we love each other in our relationships imperfectly, because while we can understand perfect love in Christ’s example, none of us can follow it at all times.

It takes some people a lifetime to unpack all their screwed-up ways. Lord knows I’m still working on all sorts of mine!

If I’m honest with myself, I recognize how I fail all my friends in their relationships. The good friendships come when we recognize that we’re all going to screw up and will just try to work through it the best that we can.

I’ve been experiencing this in another arena with a discussion on the [rocksmyfaceoff.net] Forum [which I used to run, but no longer do], about how that group is really hard to crack into at times. And I think the fact that we love and relate imperfectly is wholly central to the issues there, too. If you sit and read through that thread, you’ll see a lot of pain and hurt feelings, as well as some unfortunate pridefulness and blindness to others’ feelings. [And I count myself amongst the latter, so don't feel like I'm attacking people here.] Here’s what I said there:

We’re the Borg. Eventually, we assimiliate you and add your uniqueness to our own. But you have to accept that.

Hive mind sucks, but groups of people have hive mentalities. It’s really hard to break that, and I think it’s probably unrealistic to expect that we’re not going to act with a hive mind. Should we strive not to do it? Absolutely. But the old saw about a person being smart but people being collectively dumb certainly applies to us as well as it does any assemblage.

I have used the statement “A Community of Communities” before, and I do think that it’s appropriate. As much as I hate it, this place can be a lot like high school—most notably the Random Board. You do have a group of posters that, whether they fully realize it or not, are sitting at the popular table in the cafeteria. It’s somewhat conscious, but somewhat unconscious, too.

Lastly, let me be my normally geeky self and point you to Wikipedia’s page on Dunbar’s number, which is a neuropsychological precept that sociologists and anthropologists generally concur. On average, human social groups max out at about 150 people before breaking down, purely because of the recall limitations of the brain. Look at your church congregations [if you attend]: if you attend a small church, you certainly feel like you have an idea of who everyone is, but if your congregation is above 300 or so, chances are that there’s a number of folks whose names you’d have trouble recalling, much less know things about them [how many kids, whether their parents are still alive, what they do for a living, what football teams they root for, etc.].

Social groups are in a state of flux, too. Being a part of the “popular kids” takes a lot of time and energy, and it has to be a priority for you, I think. Of course, then you have to ask yourself if that’s really a priority. If not, well, there’s lots of other tables in the cafeteria where you can get to know some really cool folks.

Now, there was a time when that community was my primary social outlet. I found that to be unhealthy, so it’s no longer that, but it is still very much a social outlet for me, because I have met many wonderful friends from there. I think it makes a great example for all of my readers, though, that are not a part of the community about how we love imperfectly—because you’ll see it in everyone’s words.

Now, to get back to a response to Misty, she nails it:

Maybe it’s because so many of us are just broken. I know most of us are damaged in some way over something in our past. Sometimes we deal with it and go on and sometimes we just can’t get past it. And sometimes even when we are actively trying to get pass this stuff, we still run into it in our relationships. I still occasionally deal with fallout associated with my parents divorce (both in my own marriage and in my interactions with others) and I feel like I have pretty successfully dealt with their separation.

My only quibble is that “so many of us” should be “all of us”. We’re all horribly broken, horribly needy. Like Jill Phillips sings, “Nobody’s got it all together.”

I’m frustrated at the responses here that have largely railed against Don’s desire to politically express himself: comemnts such as “Miller should stick to personal reflections about his own life,” “don’t really care to hear your political opinions. just write great books and thats all.thanks,” and “I was more than a little disturbed concerning your political ramblings. Your judgments true or not are divisive at best.Your website space could have been dedicated to something more positive and helpful!” are disheartening, because they ignore this fundamental precept:

Don Miller’s political proclamations have just as much value as our own until we judge them for ourselves. To those who say, “But Don is a best-selling author! He’s using his platform for the wrong reasons!” I respond: He has as much right to his opinion as you do. His celebrity certainly amplifies the signal, but it does nothing to improve the quality of that signal.

I think that Don intended for people to engage him on the point that our President can be viewed as a creation of the modern American evangelical movement, but few seem to be doing that, choosing instead to respond to Don’s politics—whether or not they are in agreement with theirs or not. This is rather simliar to the phenomenon of “megadittos“, which simply goes back to letting other people speak for you. There’s value in that, sure—I believe in representative republics just as much as the next guy.

Our only error in evaluating Miller’s comments is if we add extra value to them because of his stature. Come election day, his vote doesn’t count any more than mine [Electoral College disparities notwithstanding].

Her pastor, Greg Newton of Lighthouse Baptist, doesn’t believe Americans are callous, but, instead, are often just too busy.

“We used to be a people that looked around — what can we do to help our neighbor, our friend? And we’ve become so busy today that we’re missing that opportunity to help our neighbors,” Newton said.

When did we go wrong? Well, maybe that’s not the conversation we need to have. I think the discussion we need to have in our church congregations is simple: why are we not actively seeking the needs of the community around us? Loving God’s people is what we’re called to do, and honestly, it’s evangelism.

The American ethos has so thoroughly infiltrated our churches that we’ve become insular—we’re all about building our new buildings. A pretty building is great, sure, and I belong to a church that is primed for growth and really needs the space. But all too often I see the major focus of congregations being, “Look what God is doing in our church body!” Yes, great … but what are you doing for God’s people?

Time and again, I come to two focuses for our church congregations: an inward focus on discipleship, and an outward focus on evangelism. While it’s vital that we equip our congregations with knowledge and truth so that they may live with the mind of Christ, I fear that we do not actualize our congregations enough in helping them find opportunities to serve, locally and globally. I find myself frustrated because I don’t know what my new city needs, and I get the response back in my head that it’s up to me to ask the questions.

Today’s devotional—and I haven’t even read the UR part, just the Bible part, as I type this—dealt with Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth:

²³“All things are lawful,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful,” but not all things build up. ²⁴Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor. ²⁵Eat whatever is sold in the meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience. ²⁶For “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.” ²⁷If one of the unbelievers invites you to dinner and you are disposed to go, eat whatever is set before you without raising any question on the ground of conscience. ²⁸But if someone says to you, “This has been offered in sacrifice,” then do not eat it, for the sake of the one who informed you, and for the sake of conscience—²⁹I do not mean your conscience, but his. For why should my liberty be determined by someone else’s conscience? ³⁰If I partake with thankfulness, why am I denounced because of that for which I give thanks?

³¹So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. ³²Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God, ³³just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, that they may be saved.

– 1 Cor. 10:23-33, English Standard Version

I’ve highlighted the bit that hit me the most. It reminded me of two things my friend Bryan has written recently. Bryan is active with his church’s youth group, and the Weblog he maintains on Xanga [I know, I know] has seen him mention the drinking of alcohol in the past. One of the elders at his church brought it up to him, and so Bryan set out to write a clear defense of the appropriate consumption of alcohol by a Christian. I think that the did an excellent job with all that, and I’ve told him so on the phone.

The other thing, though, is that Bryan zinged me in a comment for my often profane speech. He and I talked soon after that on the phone about something else, and I brought it up. [I wish I'd brought it up with a tone of penitence and gratitude, but I don't think that I can honestly say that I did.] He said that the discussion had come up in his church group about such things, and that he’d thought of me. That stung, but only because it was the truth.

See, when folks talk about all this “speaking the truth in love” stuff, this is the kind of thing that they mean. Thank you again, Bryan, for setting me straight on this.