Friday, November 30, 2012

Attitude of Gratitude (A Reflection on the 11/25 sermon)


Jeff encouraged us on Sunday to reach out to people we love and let them know we are grateful for them.  With the Wednesday mens' group, we were actually given a sheet with which to list those people, and a blue ribbon to pin on them!  I was grateful for this mid-week reminder to express how grateful I am.

Jess and I just returned from a trip to Dallas, TX for Thanksgiving.  I saw my family - my father, mother, grandmother, uncle, brother, sister, and my sister's (surprise) new dog.  Since we weren't there on a Sunday, I was glad to know that my family planned to go to a Thanksgiving morning worship service at my home church.  Going to worship with my family was such a, well, familiar feeling.  The same people were early and ready to go.  The same people (including me!) were running a little late.  When we walked into the narthex - the street entrance to the church - the space was cramped with robed choir members and pastors preparing to process, all beginning to sing the opening song.  I found a few faces I hadn't seen in seven or eight years.

A minute later, the whole family was together, taking up an entire pew.  We weren't the only ones, either.  The family seated behind us had reunited from as far away as South Africa.  How many other families were celebrating Thanksgiving this way?  Meanwhile, as the choir proceeded down the center aisle, I recognized person after person from my time in the choir there.  Then, I watched as the pastors followed them. Some I have known for years and two, a Kenyan and a Chinese pastor, reflect a changing community.  As I thought about my time with the choir and the beautiful music we sang together, about the pastors who have been God's instruments for giving me faith in Christ, and about the new outreaches of my church to reach the world through the Dallas community, the entire church was singing "Now Thank We All Our God".  I was way too choked up to sing at this point.  And I love to sing!  Ask anyone!  I literally couldn't sing a word of the song because my soul was so flooded with the beauty of our faithful God.

A mountain top experience, for sure.  Perhaps you had one this past week too!  But what is God saying to me through that?  What is God saying to you?  For me, I think it is something like this: "Chris, you are so protective of the most valuable parts of your life.  But I spoke all things into being.  Your life, your faith, your church, your family - they are all words I spoke into being.  I sustain everything, and I sustain you."

Perhaps you had a mountain top experience this past week as well.  Perhaps you feel depleted and aren't sure how to give thanks.  Either way, take this into a conversation with your heavenly Father.  As you give your thoughts and words to him, he will show you who he is, and who you are.

Reflection Questions:
1) What surprised you this past Thanksgiving week?  Did a particular moment catch you off guard, and become less or more than what you expected it to be?
2) Who is the hardest person for you to thank?  What do you wish you could say to that person?
3) Read Psalm 33, and reflect particularly on verses, 8-9.  What does it mean for your life that God spoke everything that exists into being?  What are the implications for the things that are most under your control?     


Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Psalm 44, Romans 8, and "being killed all day long"

"Because of you we are being killed all day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter." (Psalm 44: 22)

Wow!  Perhaps we can read this and say, "I've felt that way."  Thanksgiving often brings extended families together.  And perhaps it is with our families that we see this idea played out.  Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, brothers and sisters, and so on and so forth, saying one version or another of: "I've worked so hard for you...don't you care?"  The people we are closest to can be the hardest to love.  There are joyous, mountain-top experiences for sure.  But there are also deep valleys.  It is difficult, (even agonizing sometimes) to learn to live with the ones we love.  "For you we are being killed all day long."

If you read Psalm 44, you can recognize this same tension that we all know: "I've worked so hard for you...don't you care?"  Only Israel is a nation often at war with other nations.  Their soldiers were literally "killed all day long."  As hard as this sounds, it is worsened by the hope they have of a better life.  For Israel is the family of God.  They are his special possession and family.  The family struggles are all the more painful because they believe so strongly in the faithfulness of God.  Their faith is being tested.  They wonder, "Where are you, God?"

We all know what this is like: we encourage, remind, "love on" one another to make the right decision.  And sometimes it blows up in our faces!  We think, "Surely, if God was really here right now, things would be different."

Jesus and his cross make sense of all of this.  He gave everything up for us.  He came down from his throne in heaven to become like us.  If you think that is a long way to go, he then gave up that life to die for us.  He gave everything. 

Just think about "everything" for a second.  Everything you are afraid of.  Everything that poses a challenge to you.  All obstacles.  Jesus promises us that all of it is placed under his power through his death on the cross because he gave everything.  Do you believe that?

Paul did.  He thought about "everything" to describe this.  "Who will separate us from the love of Christ?  Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?" (Romans 8:35) These were probably things Paul was afraid of.  He placed them under Christ's power because he believed Christ dealt with them for good.

Then he quotes Psalm 44, "As it is written, "For your sake we are being killed all day long."  Like the Hebrews, we wonder why God isn't with us when we suffer.  But Christ makes sense of this.  Suffering is awful.  But look at Christ's life.  Wasn't God with him all the way?  Didn't God do the most amazing things through him, especially the things he suffered? So it is with us.  From this Thanksgiving to the next, as we encourage, remind, and love on our friends and neighbors, it will get messy.  Like anytime I'm about to cook anything, I remind myself, "it will get messy."  But when it does, we pray, "Christ, bring life from this death."  Bring joy from this pain!  This is the power of God at work in everyday life.  Pride and ego will keep us from loving others because we don't want to get hurt.  We can't let that happen.  This sort of thing has to die.  So may we let Christ kill it in us all day long through his Spirit alive in us.

So when we are with our loved ones, don't settle to be "close, but not too close"!  We are meant for so much more.  More of you, God, and more of those I find hardest to love.       

Thursday, November 8, 2012

I Believe in Jesus...but it's my Stuff (Part 1) (Reflection on 11/4 Message)


Kevin preached on Sunday about “our stuff”.  But before we get to the specifics, let’s think again about the big picture of the series.  Each week, the sermon title begins with “I Believe in Jesus…”.  The meaning of this is clear.  As Christians, we all want to be in a position in life where we are saying “Yes” to Jesus.  None of us wants to be in the position of taking exception to what the Lord longs for us to do anywhere in his word.  We leap to him, are content with him, and long to be with him forever.

And each week we move from this ringing affirmation to a different topic where we hesitate.  These are the topics that cause us to wonder what we’re getting ourselves into.  Are we in over our heads?  Can we afford to follow Jesus in this way and what will that mean about the way we have been living our lives?  Aren’t I the boss of myself?  Isn’t my sex life entirely up to me?  Isn’t my stuff my stuff?

As we go through the series, the challenge to each of us is to ask: “Is my affirmation of Jesus whole-hearted?”  “Do I hesitate?”  If we do hesitate, we do well to look into our lives for the obstacles to a more joyous, whole-hearted walk with the Lord of the universe.  He is the vine.  We are the branches.  But a branch with too much on it needs to be pruned.  Why?  Because it will break if the burden is too heavy.  Our load is lightened as we give more of our possession, our “stuff”, to be used for God’s glory.

God will use it.  Jessica and I moved into our home two weeks ago.  Our four U-Boxes were waiting for us.  Within them were all the sofas, chairs, mattresses, books, file cabinets, dishes, and all manner of “stuff” that we hadn’t seen in months.  It was great to see it all again.  But our time without them had been of a long enough duration, that we had started to wonder, “How much of this do we really need?”  Well, we haven’t sold anything yet!  Nor do we necessarily intend to.  (In fact, we’ve bought more stuff!)  But we are living the question Kevin posed to us.  “Whose are these…really?”  We are comforted in our hearts that our prayer is: “Lord, use this space for ministry.  Use our home for Christ’s glory.”

In Revelation 21, John is describing the glorious city of God.  There’s no temple, for the Lord God himself is the temple.  The city has no sun or moon to shine for the glory of God is its light.  In verse 24, we find this line: “The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.  Its gates will never be shut by day – and there will be no night there.  People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.”  What might this glory and honor be?  We might have a clue from another passage that speaks about God’s eternal city: Isaiah 60:11,13.  “Your gates shall always be open; day and night they shall not be shut, so that nations shall bring you their wealth, with their kings led in procession…the glory of Lebanon shall come to you, the cypress, the plane, and the pine, to beautify the place of my sanctuary; and I will glorify where my feet rest.”

What do these texts tell us about our “stuff”?  Well, it appears that we can expect some redeemed, transformed version of cultural goods to furnish the heavenly city.  “The cypress, the plane, the pine” will be in the city.  In another part of Isaiah, we learn that “the ships of Tarshish” will be there.  Can you imagine building a grand enough ship that God himself considers it worthy to adorn his heavenly courts? 

It is true that nothing and nobody will simply sail into heaven.  Everything of this earth must undergo a transformation, a humbling, a judgment. And indeed, both Isaiah and John in Revelation both condemn goods that are used to worship anything other than God.  God promises to “shatter” the ships of Tarshish in Psalm 48.   We all have to get the death out of us.  This is why Jesus came.  He is the life from death.  It is given to us through faith in him. 

As we look forward to the last day, these passages lead us to expect that the city of God will be populated not only with redeemed people, but redeemed things, possessions – redeemed “stuff”.  Andy Crouch writes, “The new Jerusalem will be truly a city: a place suffused with culture, a place where culture has reached its full flourishing.  It will be the place where God’s instruction to the first human beings is fulfilled, where all the latent potentialities of the world will be discovered and released by creative, cultivating people.” (Culture Making, 169)

Perhaps we can say this: you can’t take it with you.  But if it the Holy Spirit used it to make you more like Christ, don’t be surprised if you see it in the heavenly city. 
David had a slingshot and five stones with which to accomplish God’s will.  Will they be in heaven?  Only God knows!  But these passages teach us that your stuff matters to God.  The stuff of creation is of eternal use to God.  What does that say about our things?  What is our prayer for our possessions?

Reflection Questions:

1)    Have you ever found difficulty parting with a prized possession when you found a better purpose for it?

2)    In his fascinating book, Culture Making, Andy Crouch writes “…human beings, in God’s original intention and in their redemptive destination, cannot be separated from the cultural goods they create and cultivate at their best.”  Think of tables, chairs, meals, vehicles, clothing, roads, (or anything else humans make of creation).  What role did these play in making you who you are in Christ?
       3) What is your prayer for your home and possessions?