How could I avoid this topic any longer? When tragedy strikes, it is our job to act. Humanity was created with community in mind. “I’ve been there”, is one of the most comforting things that we can ever hear. There are other people who feel the same way you do. Who have done what you have done. Who have been through something similar, and it helps to know that you are not alone. Hell doesn’t feel like Hell when you hear, “me too”. “Me too”, are two of the most powerful words that we can ever hear. This is because loneliness is conquered by connection.
Many times we wrestle with God because our opinion of Him is that He is distant and that He doesn’t know what it is like to be us. We don’t have a deity that is clueless. We serve a God that was God enough to make the decision to be with us. He didn’t have to, but He did, just to relate better. (John 1:14) God became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood. Not only does He understand what it is to live like us, He knows what it is like to suffer like us. He knows what it means to struggle like us, in the worst way. He is the God that knows what it’s like. He’s not way far way, He is right here. He’s not there, He is here. He is present. He knows what it is like here.
You are God for someone else. You should not like when someone else is not included. You should not like it when there is exclusion, alienation, pain and loneliness. We are the God for those that don’t see the God of all things. We serve an invisible God, for the visible world to know He is there. We the visible, have to do what the invisible would do. We bring the invisible to the visible. Inclusion + Interaction = Incarnation. God loves to show up dressed as people. Incarnation can happen all the time if we begin to work. We can not let relief be trendy, it has to be typical.
Where was God in Haiti? He has always been there, wait for the rest of us to show up.
Haiti we are on the way!
CHURCH
There are plenty of us that have brushed up against Christianity and have been left with an uncomfortable feeling. We have tried it and it left us feeling stale and lame and some of us decided to stay away based on those feelings. We refer to it as “searching” or “seeking” or “on a journey”, but what ever it is,it is totally normal to the human experience.
This experience is true for so many people. And because it is, then where has the church failed? Where did we blow it? When did we start mindless ideas that left people empty, angry, and ultimately separated from God? How has the church failed in our modern culture?
No one the bible is committing to the argument that God exists. The assumption is that He does. No one has to prove if reality exists, because it does. So then we don’t have to argue that God exists because He is the ultimate reality. So the writers of the bible were people making observations about what was already reality. Statements about God are assumptions about ultimate reality.
Jesus exposes us to the deepest levels of our existence. We have to remember that the religious right of his time was not Christianity, it was Judaism. Everything that he then taught was revolutionary to that contemporary religious order. So Jesus was not coming to just start a religious order that he thought was better. No. He came to expose things as they really are. Not through the eyes of religion, but through the eyes reality. Jesus is not calling us to a religious structure, he is calling us to how things are.
So as a “Christian”, we then should be people that are in tune or in harmony with how reality is at it’s deepest level. He didn’t come to create a new thing and then sit separated, he came to show us how it really is. We don’t have to defend reality.
CHURCH
The issue with religion is that religion says, something scared has to take place in order for something to be spiritually “Holy”. But the question is what makes that thing any Holier then the other thing? And the answer is….(wait for it, wait for it) it is not. We miss the power of God if we think that He is limited to ritual. This misunderstanding of ritualistic Holiness ends up harming us and confusing God’s plan, purpose, and presence in His creation. Holiness and Sanctity are everywhere and we are not awake to it. He is everywhere and we are asleep. He is always in the place and we are the ones that just showed up.
Jesus was teaching us to be in tune to what is always happening around us. The idea is that you might live a better life if you understood that He is involved and concerned with every area of your life. Every interaction, every conversation, every place, every person, every mess, every time, every problem, every location. God is always doing something. It’s not a view that He is involved with the things that are “churchy”. He doesn’t get bored with one thing and moves onto another thing and forgets about the first thing. If He is not done with me then He is not done with you. If He can be here then He can be there. He is always working. Life in Christ is about being fully awake to the work of God in all things. (John 5:17)
“The purpose of worship is not to escape from this world, into the other world, but to open oneself to the meaning of Christ in the Common.” Church is not supposed to be a bubble that you run to, to hide from the world. It is a place where you go to learn how to make every place a sanctuary. We are to learn how to be like Christ in unChirst like situations. Worship is to help is realize these depths of our world. If worship doesn’t do this, then it is an empty ritual.” (John Robinson-Honest to God)
CHURCH!
Liberation is a process not an event. There is a distinction between salvation and liberation. It is possible to be saved and still need liberation. Your personal sins have been remitted from the cross, but the after effects of the victimization that has been done to us still lingers. It is miserable being a Christian that is converted but still be bound by the oppression of your past that is affecting your quality of life. It is God’s will that you enjoy liberty. He wants you to be able to do the things that he called you to do without the constraints of past entanglements and problems. It’s a great thing to be free. But there is some residual effect of that which was done to you. It’s not based on geographical location, because you can leave the scene of the victimization but still have some residue that still haunts you. Deliverance can be difficult. It’s a difficult process because of a challenging problem that continues to manifest in your life Identification: Your experiences in the world shape what you call “normal”. You spend years defining yourself through the things or people that you are connected to. But once you get freed from a bad relationship, the struggle is now regaining a sense of “who am I now, apart from you?” (Children of Israel vs. Egyptians) What is this thing that posses us that we find it difficult to break our tie with our oppressor? You have to allow yourself to be blessed. Do not be afraid to be redefined. The way to break the tie of the past is to be fascinated with the future. You have to be intrigued with where your going instead of being attached and wrestling with where you came from.
CHURCH!
When it comes to faith, everybody has it. I have often heard people say that they are unable to have the same faith that I do because it is just too hard. The idea that some people have faith and others don’t is a very popular, although it is not true. Everybody has faith! Everybody is following someone or something. Over the majority of modern history, Christianity has been under the scrutiny of the world’s religions for being “closed-minded” and believing that Christians are the only ones with faith and this is not true. No matter what your perspective is on life, it is a faith perspective. The person that says we are here by random happenstance is using faith to determine and follow that notion. An atheist is a person of tremendous faith. We are not talking about faith or no faith, belief or no belief. We are talking about faith in what? Belief in what? The real question is not if we have it or not, but what we have put it in.
The tension of faith is not a new one. Paul argued this point for the Gentiles that had received Christ in Galatia, when they faced the challenge of what to believe, how to believe and what should be the expression of their belief. (Gal 4) This argument transcended time and raised its head again in the 16th century and was the wedge that created the Reformation and formation of the Protestant church. Martin Luther stated that Sola Fide (Faith Alone) is “the principle on which the church rises or falls.” John Calvin later affirmed this statement by saying that “justification by faith is the principle hinge by which religion is supported”. But the message the moves through the minds of men for the dawn of time is how to get the all knowing, almighty, all seeing God on your side. Mankind seeks acceptance, and questions what will be enough to get the thumbs up from the creator.
The fight of faith was exposed in the lives of the first family with the first sibling rivalry between Cain and his brother Able. This story of a favored offering that sparks untamed anger and leads to ultimate destruction is a conflict between Cain and Able, but it is an insight for works vs. faith and even deeper, religion vs. revelation. Psychologically man becomes uncomfortable with the notion that what I do, what I participate in, and what I offer through my actions may not be good enough. What can I do to be enough? I mean, we live in a quantifiable world. I know when enough is enough with every intersection of my life, but this invisible God leaves this unquantifiable gap between humanity and divinity. But does He? Does an all knowing, all seeing, all powerful, almighty God leave justification to be an ambiguous undefined subject in our existence?
This is the question that man attempts to answer with the creation of religion. Man uses religion to restore himself to God due to his unpleasing fallen state. But there is a fatal flaw in religion. Religion will always find its strength in what my hands do themselves. Religion puts the emphasis on the work that I do. The problem with religious justification is that what I do is already flawed, if I am doing it for myself. Religion only gives you the credit for what you did. Religion will always honor itself and a faith in that is misleading. This is the tension that Cain found himself in. The work that he did with his hands; the plowing, the tilling, the hoeing, and the harvesting was not acceptable enough. This was because Cain was his work. Cain was his religion and to separate the two meant destruction to who he was, not knowing there is a difference between religion and revelation. True faith brings about revelation. It was this revelation that Able operated in. If man is going to be in right standing with God, it is going to take blood. It is the shedding of blood that will redeem a fallen state of man. Able had the revelation from God that it is not about what I raked and hoed and labored to do. But it is through only what God can give that I can obtain righteousness. Because what God demands, God will give. What God asks, God will answer. What God needs, God will supply.
“It strikes us, when year after year our longed for perfection of life does not appear. The only thing one can do is accept the fact that you’re accepted. This is grace. You may not know more than before. You may not feel different than before, but everything it transformed”-Paul Tillich
CHURCH!
Gen 12:1-4: Real pivotal point in scripture. God is creating a new initiative for connecting in a relationship with the people that He calls His own. This doesn’t mean that this is the first time that God communicates with His people, that is obvious because God was in a relationship and communicated with His people since Gen. 1, but things change in this chapter. God comes to Abram and says I want you to leave everything that you know, because I’ve got something different for you. This something that God had in store for Abram was a blessing. It was something that he had never seen or experienced before. This blessing was so gigantic that it would change his life so much that Abram would have to change his name.
God’s Blessing is:
Instrumental: God’s blessing for Abram does not end with just Abram. It was not just a single blessing for one person. Abram received the blessing so that he could become a blessing. It was received to be distributed. Abram is a new means to an end. The good life that Abram was promised and did receive wasn’t just so that he could chill and enjoy it, and live life playa style. Abraham has become a medium of God’s blessing.
So the same suit fits us. We are not just chosen, or predestined, elected or called, just to be called. God says that you predestined to be holy, you are called to be a Son of God, you are chosen for His glory. These things exist as windows of opportunity for us to be something outside of ourselves for someone else. It is not just about me.
Universal: God’s blessing is in response to the sin separation in the world. God’s blessing is no respecter of ethnicity, color, political affiliation. God’s blessing doesn’t pay attention to policy, or timeline, or economy, or even morality. It’s for everyone, everywhere. God invited Abram to live out this blessing and to become a light in a dimly lit world. Abram says yes. But as generations pass, more and more people forget that the plan was to be lights and they disconnect from the mission.
We go OUTWARD because this is what God is like. God doesn’t just exist for Himself, and God doesn’t live just for Himself. He wants His love to be on display to everyone. We go OUTWARD because the heart of God goes OUTWARD. This is what He is calling His church to. So what can we learn as a church about this.
A good life is not about talking about all the things that you would not do just because you have been called by God. I used to think that living such a good life meant explaining to people what I don’t do now. “I don’t do this”, and “never do that”, and “you can’t do this until”, and “you may have done that, but you need to feel sorry for it”; are all things that we have heard or said about the “good life” we have in God. But a good life goes beyond the type of books you don’t read, or movies you won’t watch, or that type of people that you would never hang out with. A good life is more about what we choose to do. How do I choose to spend my time? Where do I choose to give my money? Who do I choose to associate with and why? Who do I invest in? What am I passionate about? How has God shown me love, so that I can show that to other people? When you live life in such a way as this, you become compelling and not repelling. What is it for you? How can you find and promote the divine in the daily?
Jesus calls his church to be a compelling force for good in the world. God uses people as agents of change, to relieve suffering and fight injustice; living out the transforming message of the resurrected Jesus. We believe that the church is at its best when it serves, sacrifices, and loves caring about the things God cares about. We were created to live for something larger than ourselves.
CHURCH!
