Time for Light to Shine

In his interview with Presbyterian Outlook, Stanley Hauerwas makes a particularly sharp observation: "The church has lost its ability to be a disciplined community because we’re now, religiously, in a buyer’s market. Christianity has to bill itself as very good for your self-realization, and that’s killing us because we’re not very good for your self-realization. We’re good for your salvation, which is not the same thing."

It is time for us to stand up and dare to believe that Jesus Christ knew what he was doing when he called us to come and deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him. Christianity CANNOT bill itself as very good for your self-realization-- that's like saying something is very good for developing heart disease.

We do not peddle a better drug-- we represent the cure! And the cure is hard-- "Come and die to yourself, and understand that you cannot realize who you are, or who you were made to be, until you are surrendered to me," says Jesus Christ.

Dr. Hauerwas sees the negative-- I see the opportunity. If we will stop mouthing the cultural mush that passes for "spirituality" or even Christianity, we can stand and open the door for this nation of addicts-- to work, sex, drugs, alcohol, exercise, status, shopping, _____-- to find REAL life, REAL freedom, REAL peace.

We are not, religiously, in a buyer's market. We must live with the fact that not everyone, perhaps not anyone who we want to, will hear what we say, or do what Christ asks. If we stopped caring about the results and consequences, and just LIVED in the freedom Christ has given us, the Lord will lead those whom He is calling to the light.

Life is pain-- anyone who tells you something different is selling something (The Princess Bride). We have nothing to sell. We are bought, and that at a very high price. It is only Christ's freedom that leads us out of the imprisoning intoxication with self.

Maybe Tiger Woods needs a call from that kind of friend these days. He is legion; the field is ripe for harvest, but the laborers are few. Shine, and watch what Christ can do.

Questions for the Moderator

No, I didn't die... but life has gotten marvelously complicated in some wonderful ways. We are making some progress on bringing the congregations of Oak Cliff together, new staff folks are pushing OCPC's mission forward, and we are growing in number, in depth, and in mission. But I am no longer young-- I've taken my first unintended naps sitting up.

Anyway, Bruce Reyes-Chow on his Moderator's Blog asked for questions. Here are mine, some of them as old as my presence in the PC(USA)-- that's 30 years. Yikes.

Here are my 3:
1)Being Presbyterian in the PC(USA) seems to have been reduced to political rugby, with the ones who have the power making the rules. How do we change the game? How do we get back to the work that Jesus Christ called us to do?

While I would hate to generalize that everyone in power right now does not have God's greatest hopes of us at heart, I do agree that it seems as if we are still locked in a battle that will require a winner or loser regardless of the outcome of theological or ideological polity issues. The game must simply be played differently by those that wish do to so. The hard part is that until enough see and live a different way of being church, there will be a huge amount of tension and resistance. At that point I suppose it comes down to really knowing what we are fighting over and if it is worth it for anyone, because in the end, if we are taking away any power of the collective presence of the Body of Christ in the world, all of our energies for any of this is for naught.


2)How do we build bridges on issues that are NOT salvation issues, instead of raising our disagreements to become salvation issues?

Hmmmm . . . interesting question. Again, it will take people willing to step outside of traditional ideological camps and take some risks to be in community with people with home we disagree with those things that, at the end of the day, are NOT salvation issues. Again, intriguing question.


3)Why is it so hard for Presbyterians to talk about Jesus in the second person familiar?

I am not sure that is true in some parts of our church. The bigger issue is whether we do that individually or corporately. I think the most healthy congregations are ones that can unabashedly and faithfully do both.


I'm supposed to put his answers here when they come, so stay tuned. I will try to pick up a little bit more on the blog as other commitments wind down to a close. If anyone out there is still reading, thanks for checking in.

Navigating IS the Destination

Goals, goals, goals.... Have you set your goals yet? If you've accomplished something, then what's your next goal? What do you want to do? What are you going to do next? What do you want out of life? So much of the way we ask questions like these seems to me to lead us farther and farther away from the only One Who is The Answer.
Our questions focus on us-- on what we can see and touch and measure. It seems funny that we never see Jesus struggling with goals and objective statements. "So... my first year of ministry is behind me; what's next...hmm... give me a pad of post-it poster paper and let's figure this out."
For Jesus, all that was necessary was constant communication with His Abba. Whatever came from his intimate contact with God is what He knew to do. Could it be that THIS is the real reason we are to "pray without ceasing"?
We are so busy with our slide-rules trying to figure out where the ball will hit next that prayer becomes a distraction. I will admit I do this all the time, and God is slowly convicting stubborn me of it-- my teenage children will come and sit down on the couch, and start talking to me just when I've gotten absorbed in some silly TV program. God help me, I almost always make the wrong choice, vacantly saying to them, "uh-huh, uh-huh" while trying to keep up with what doesn't really matter, but has captured my interest.
In our trying to figure things out, are we so captivated by our plans, by the intricacies of our strategizing and the drama of our situation, that all God gets from us is "uh-huh"?
I am tired of hearing that the Presbyterian Church (USA) must split, has split, by the arm-chair quarterbacking of what so-and-so ought to do next, by hashing and re-hashing old stories as if we will finally find the missing clue that will tell us what to do next...when God is speaking NOW. How many of us are listening? What would it take for us to listen?
I think that there is a path God would have us walk, that is not on any affinity group's map. So, I guess I will walk where I believe God is leading. It will be interesting to see what happens next-- all I know is that it will come from God's hand.

Reconciliation IN CHRIST

In a recent Outlook article, Princeton Seminary demonstrated why I get so much grief from my brothers and sisters when I begin to talk about reconciliation. Like "justice," reconciliation has lost its primary defining characteristic, and become some sort of self-defining end on its own.

Reconcilation is not about understanding the other; it is not about warm feelings. Justice is not about the world living up (or down, as the case more usually would be) to my standards of fairness. Neither reconciliation nor justice mean anything without their defining referent: in Christ.

Reconciliation in Christ is not about being proud of my identity; it is losing my identity, and being solely identified with Jesus Christ. I am not a white Christian; I am a Christian who happens to be white. I am not an Anglo-Saxon Christian; I am a Christian who happens to (predominantly) be Anglo-Saxon. The fact that our identity puts Christ LAST should tell us about His true place in Christendom; for reconciliation to be real, Christ must be FIRST. Christ must be ALL.

So many of our problems as a denomination come from this most toxic vestige of the church as a social policeman-- that Christ is only an appendix to our cultural identity, rather than the identity which leads us out of our own culture, and into the Kingdom of God. Instead of celebrating what we were, reconciliation is a recognition that culture is our identity no longer-- that Christ has transformed us so that there is no Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. If we are ever to be one, it is only oneness IN JESUS CHRIST.

This is the radical reformation of our time in Western culture-- to preach that the blood of Jesus Christ can cleanse all sin, heal all divisions, and unify all peoples. The blood of Jesus Christ is God's plan for the fullness of time, to bring all things back together in Him. That radical reconciliation is only possible through the Savior-- but if the Savior owns us, we are that reconcilation's ambassadors.

What We Found Around the Corner

Thanks for the prayers out there!
What we found out today is that nobody is absolutely sure what actually happened to Nell in December after the surgery-- which makes me feel a little bit better about the intern doctor who tossed us down the fast chute to hell that midnight after Nell's stroke-like symptoms surfaced. Two doctors seem to see a "residual deficit"-- a weakness that would say that what happened was not transient ischemia, but actual damage-- a stroke.

Dr. Sacco explained more of what neurologists are looking for in some of the arcane tasks they give to the person they are examining. From his description of what he would be looking for, what the other doctors claim is "residual deficit" may just be relative strength of each side of her body, and not a deficit at all. So, maybe she had a stroke-- maybe she didn't.

So with that clear as mud, we go to the pictures...which show beautiful new arteries forming a fern-like pattern out of the artery that now lies on the top of her brain. December, that half of her brain is dark-- no arterial flow at all. Now, it is almost as bright as the right. It's beautiful. As we left, I gave Dr. Sacco a compliment-- it turns out surgeons aren't any better at receiving them than I am! He had obviously been in surgery that morning, and was tired-- but he explained all that we needed to know. Whether he will accept it or not, he's pretty amazing. Thank you God for David Sacco.

Prayers Appreciated

Hey out there in cyberspace--
Six months flies by quickly. It's time to find out how Nell's surgery is working, so tomorrow we go in at 7am for the next MRI, and then have doctors read the results. What a blessing it is that now the scans are all electronic, not film. So, we turn another corner tomorrow, and we get to see where the path leads this time.
Everything we see is good, but...I've been surprised too many times turning corners to let my guard down too far. Tomorrow, we will see....

No Despair

Oh for five smooth stones-- and for a battle where five smooth stones were all that I needed. It's been a long time between posts if anyone is still reading out there-- a lot has been happening at OCPC, in Grace Presbytery, in the General Assembly work I was called to do, and in the work to bring some economic revitalization to the southern sector of Dallas. Between leaky roofs and water heaters, conversation groups, committee meetings and reports, time just disappears. I wish I felt like I had something to show for it.

I think that's the reason most of us leave the intractable problems alone-- we fall into despair. One of my heroes was a captain in the Royal Navy early in the 19th century, after Britain outlawed the slave trade. His life was spent in the frustrating reality that laws do not actually govern human behavior. Just because selling people into bondage was illegal did not mean that the merchants stopped doing it; slavery was, and still is, one of the most profitable trades. All his working life, the captain attempted to stop and seize ships engaged in this evil trade. Some he stopped, but many were too swift for him to catch; and he knew that there were many whose sails he never even spied. In this thankless task, he drove his crew on with a simple motto: "Nil Desperandum"-- No Despair.

This is a time for thankless work-- for clearing ground, laying foundations, digging ditches for a new Church that will rise from Christ's work in later generations. Nobody signed on for this; we all have grown soft from the sordid luxuries of Christendom. But it is time to work-- to again declare that Christ is a new identity, trumping race, glass, gender-- trumping EVERY other identity. And if we are in Christ, then we must be about Christ's business, and we must begin to find Christ's way to be one voice with one Gospel proclaiming one Hope and living out one Love across all the boundaries which have too long clung so closely to us that we have forgotten how to run the race set before us.

No one may follow-- but that cannot stop our preaching. No one may approve-- that cannot stop our obedience. No one may believe that such a future can exist-- that cannot stop us from working toward it. However long it takes, however many generations work, whatever comes of my life given to the work-- even if it is nothing-- the Word prods on: "Do not be afraid. No despair." For we work not for the reward from the work of our hands, but for the reward that is ours, given from His nail-scarred hand-- "take my yoke upon you, learn of me, and you will find rest for your souls." When I see Christ, that will be time enough to rest. On with the next meeting, the next paper, the next Bible Study, the next sermon. Nil Desperandum.