Unreasonable Joy

The snow started falling at 3:00 pm on Saturday.  A smattering of flakes became a swirling mess.  By the time I woke up at 6:00 am on Sunday, Long Island had been pummeled with 18 inches of snow.  After cancelling church services (definitely the most powerful executive decision I get to make as the Senior Pastor – and I’ve used these executive powers twice in 22 years), I started shoveling our 40 foot long driveway.

The snow was compliant – soft, fluffy, light – until I walked up the street.  Somehow and for some reason the plow had dumped 90% of the wet, heavy, street-chunks onto the odd side of the road.  My side!  My neighbors on the even side of Ingrid Road got off easy.  I couldn’t believe it.  It seemed like yet another vicious example of Oddism, mistreating people based on their street address.  Seriously, I was outraged.  Breaking up and hauling away the chunks took me over an hour.  Afterwards, I went inside, made a huge ham and cheese omelet, built a roaring fire and read some great short stories, but my back still hurt from all the shoveling.

A few hours later I opened my email and read a desperate plea for prayer from my friend Dr. Joe Harvey.  Joe runs a Christian hospital in the Congo, where things are quickly descending into a hell-hole of violence, warfare, and disease (including a Swine Flu epidemic).

Since October over 77,000 refugees have flooded across the Oubangui River into Joe’s region.  Half of his patients desperately need nutritional support and most of them can’t pay.  On Tuesday Joe’s staff had to hide two wounded rebel soldiers from a mob of local vigilantes.  “God knows if things are about to turn around,” Joe concluded, “or descend into complete chaos, but I believe He wants us to be prepared either way.”

Joe put my life in perspective.  Sometimes the things that irk me are utterly ridiculous: an inconvenient snowfall, perceived slights and injustices, a mildly sore back.  And at times my lack of gratitude – for ham and cheese omelets, fresh-fallen snow on evergreen trees, the smell of burning oak logs, a warm and safe house, good books and stories – seems equally ludicrous.

In his typical adolescent sarcasm, my 16 year old son sometimes says, “Gee, dad, that’s too bad.  Why don’t you call the Waaambulance?”  He’s got a point.  Self-pity, resentment and ingratitude can from an emotional Bermuda Triangle, sucking me into a vortex of unhappiness.  Fortunately, simple biblical/spiritual practices – giving thanks to God, receiving the Eucharist, praying for others (like Dr. Joe Harvey), listening to the lonely, serving the poor – not only connect me to Jesus and help others, they also warm my heart with the wine of God’s unreasonable joy.

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Jesus, Save Us from Your Followers

Every time I think the culture is giving us a bad rap (a reverse judgmental spirit), I hear another horror story about our very un-salty behavior.  After Harvard Professor Kay Redfield Jamison courageously described her struggle with mental illness, she received thousands of letters.  Most of the disturbing letters came from “fundamentalist Christians” berating her for turning her back on God.  According to Jamison, “Others thought my illness just deserts for not having truly accepted Jesus Christ into my heart, or for not having prayed sincerely enough.  I had left my heart open to Satan, and he had entered in.  Madness and despair were precisely what I deserved and would have in this world and the next … One woman, who included a prayer card with excerpts from the Bible, wrote that it was a good thing I hadn’t had children as I had at lead ‘spared the world of one more crazy manic-depressive.  (See Kay Redfield Jamison, Nothing Was the Same, pages 43-44).

If we get persecuted for this kind of behavior, we deserve it.  This is just plain stupid, and so unlike Jesus.  Jesus was without sin and yet sinners flocked to him.  He even called sinners to repent – not exactly a church growth strategy – but broken people felt his compassion, not terror.  As my friend and author Denis Haack notes, “Our message is the Gospel of Christ, and since he is attractive, shouldn’t our proclamation (and our lives!) be attractive as well?” (See ransomfellowship.org).

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Weeping at the movies: A Scene from Crash

There’s a scene in the movie Crash in which a disgruntled store owner tracks down a repairman.  The store owner follows the repairman to his home and accosts him in the driveway.  He waves a gun in the air as he screams his displeasure.  Meanwhile the repairman’s daughter sees her daddy in the driveway and she runs out the front door to greet him.  The store owner shoots wildly and accidentally hits the little girl, dropping her to the ground, dead.

Recently my oldest son and his wife were watching that scene and I knew what was coming.  I watched the store owner wave the gun and the repairman beg for mercy.  I saw the little girl run out the door and … I couldn’t watch it.  Instead, I bolted out of the room, ran upstairs, sat on the kitchen floor, alone, in the dark, and wept.

Honestly, I don’t know why I wept.  I’ve seen the movie three times.  I know it’s just a movie with a fictitious script and paid actors.  So why did I run out of the room and weep?  Did I weep for all the racism and hatred on this sad planet?  Did I weep for all the regrets and wounds in my own life?  Did I weep for all the little girls who will drop dead tonight or be abused or tormented or raped?  Did I weep for all the disappointments and betrayals that I can’t heal or fix?

I really don’t know.  Maybe, just maybe, I wept because Jesus is in me.  Maybe Jesus and I know a little secret: Little girls should run to their daddies and kiss their necks.  They shouldn’t drop dead, but they do.  Ethnic groups shouldn’t hate and kill each other, but they do.  Ah, the resurrection will come, but it isn’t here yet.  Not in fullness.  So we wait and we groan and we weep.  Jesus weeps too.  And sometimes all I can do is sit beside him at my kitchen table and cry with him over this broken world.  At least I’m not numb anymore.  I’m slowly learning to feel with Jesus, weeping with Jesus and working with Jesus until little girls don’t get shot in their daddy’s arms.

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Loving through the Fog

What does it mean to become more Christ-like and thus more truly human?  It means to love well and then to keep loving over the long haul.  In this regard, I’m moved by this story from Jean Vanier’s book Becoming Human:

“I know a man who lives in Paris.  His wife has Alzheimer’s. He was an important business man – his life was filled with busyness.  But he said that when his wife fell sick, ‘I just couldn’t put her in an institution, so I keep her.  I feed her.  I bathe her.’  I went to Paris to visit them, and this businessman who had been very busy all his life said, ‘I have changed.  I have become more human.’  I got a letter from him recently.  He said that in the middle of the night his wife woke him up.  She came out of the fog for a moment, and she said, ‘Darling, I just want to say thank you for all you’re doing for me.’  Then she fell back into the fog.  He said, ‘I wept and I wept.’”

I think of that story often.  I used to be just like that important businessman – busy, driven, egotistical, demanding and impatient.  And I did it all for God!  I’d like to think that God has made me more Christ-like and more human.  I hope so anyway.  But the question still lingers: Do I keep loving people while they walk through a long, painful fog?

Help me, Lord Jesus!

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The Folly and Powerlessness of Prayer

Perhaps the hardest thing about prayer is that it just feels so powerless.  In contrast, when I can do something practical for you – rake your yard, buy your lunch, work for fair housing, solve your problems – I feel powerful; I feel in control.  By comparison, prayer feels powerless, quiet, small and hidden.  That’s the real “folly” of prayer.  It’s so wrapped up with humans and humans are notoriously slow and vulnerable.  A colony of bacteria can kill us.  A lustful desire can drive us insane with addiction.  And then we’re also stubborn, spiritually inattentive and even callous towards God and others.  How can God possibly use our prayers to do anything for good in this world?  It just seems so powerless.

I’m starting to notice how God works through our powerlessness and our weakness (not to mention our pain and our failures) to accomplish his purposes for the world.  I think of my friend Theresa who experienced a dark, dark night of the soul. After finding the man of her dreams, she dropped into the abyss of a deep depression.  Everything went dark in her mind and her body.  Three years ago I would have had plenty of answers and solutions for her.  I would have been so clever and powerful.  But now all I could do was to sit with her in her pain.  We prayed.  I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t have any answers, so I said, “Theresa, I have no idea what to say so could we just read Psalm 77.”  Then I read Psalm 77, an agonizing psalm of lament, and I went home.  I left feeling utterly powerless.

The next week I discovered that she had been clinging to Psalm 77 every day.  Apparently, when we read Psalm 77 in utter powerlessness, God showed up in her life with power.

At times the best, most powerful and most useful way to love you is to get to the end of myself.  I admit that I can’t fix you or change you.  But I can be with you and we can go together to the Father.  So we come as frail and hard-hearted instruments, but we also come as sons and daughters who know their Father’s heart.   And on your behalf I do something so useless that leads to such power: I pray for you.

(Adapted from The Folly of Prayer)

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Loving Redemption Stories – Parts 2 and 3

Redemption Stories – Part 2: A bad middle

I love redemption stories (see Part 1 in the previous blog) – and they are everywhere.  They start with a good beginning, but unfortunately life has a way of unraveling doesn’t it?   The plot suddenly swells with tension.  Stuff happens – bad stuff, evil stuff, mean stuff.  In The Lord of the Rings the ring of power starts to corrupt everyone who touches it.  In The Wizard of Oz Dorothy gets whacked on the head and then those creepy flying monkeys descend on Toto.  In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne, a mild mannered accountant, acts rashly and winds up serving two consecutive life terms.

At times the bad stuff is our fault.  We betray someone, or perhaps a bunch of people.  We allow sin to fester in our lives.  We thought it would be our private sin party, but it leaks out and hurts others.  We battle an addiction and lose.  We botch a business deal or a job or a relationship.  The victimized achieve freedom, grab power and then become the next wave of oppressors.

Sometimes the bad stuff just happens: cancer, pain, betrayal, injustice, shattered dreams, church splits.  It could be a quick turn of events or a slow and deadening despair, like weeds taking over a garden.

In the Book of Ruth, Elimilech’s daring plan to save his family and start a new life unravels.  He drops dead and then their two sons kick the bucket.  This isn’t just trouble; this is a tragedy, a devastation, a freaking train wreck – and the shards of twisted steel pierce Naomi’s chest.

Stuff happens.  Wow, does it ever!  Some people get hammered by life, but eventually everyone gets something.  Bob Dylan once sang, “We’ve got to get back to the garden,” but that’s the problem: we can’t; there’s two angels with flaming swords guarding the path.  .

We try to minimize and blunt the pain by mouthing stupid clichés like “It could be worse.”  Okay, maybe, but it still hurts.  That’s one reason why I love the Bible: it’s so refreshingly honest.  Someone betrays the psalmist and he asks God to smack the guy in the teeth.  Jesus comes to the grave of his friend – definitely a bad middle for Lazarus and his sisters – and he wails like a newborn baby.

But a redemption story doesn’t just give permission for brutal honesty; like a deep and strong river, it also sweeps us along toward a happy ending.

Redemption Stories – Part 3: A happy ending

Happy endings make redemption stories irresistible.  They take us on a journey, through danger and sadness, but they lead us back home or to a better home.  Dorothy clicks her heels and wakes up in Kansas again.  Homer boots out his wife’s suitors and reclaims her heart.  A beauty loves the beast, the spell breaks and the beast becomes a kind and humane prince.  Andy Dufresne comes fully alive and then outwits the evil warden, escaping through a sewer to freedom.  Bilbo Baggins encounters unwanted adventures and near death but he finally returns home.  Boaz redeems Ruth and Naomi and the story ends with a fat little grandson sitting on Naomi’s lap.

That’s why the Bible is the best, grandest and most daring redemption story anywhere.  From Genesis, to Isaiah and right through Jesus and Revelation, the Bible declares the most outlandish and outrageous promises of restoration.  In Christ painful relationships will heal.  Addictions will be overcome.  Brokenness – even in our bodies – will become whole.  Injustice, poverty and racism are all vanquished.  Emptiness leads to fullness.  God wipes every tear from our eye.  All things are restored.

It’s almost too good to be true … and it would be if we didn’t have a Storyteller-Redeemer who can actually make redemption happen.  One of the deepest biblical miracles is that the Triune God lived his own redemption story.  As the eternal Son of God, Jesus had the best beginning.  But then for us and our salvation he plunged into his own bad middle, identifying with and absorbing all of our bad middles.  God took our failures, our wounds, our betrayals, our injustices, our sins and our addictions; he left out nothing, he ignored nothing, he judged everything; but in Christ and through Christ and with Christ, God turned all of these dark moments into facets of the bright and happy ending.  Somehow God will knit these sharp and dangerous fragments into His cosmic redemption story.

I have a hunch that we love redemption stories because God loves them too.  And maybe God sprinkles enough redemption stories into every culture – through fairy tales and films and novels and sacred texts – so that we’ll hunger for and quest after the Jesus story, the truest, deepest, most beautiful redemption story of all.

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Why We Love Redemption Stories – Part 1

Flash Quiz: What do the following have in common – Lord of the Rings, Homer’s Odyssey, Shawshank Redemption, The Wizard of Oz, Beauty and the Beast, the Exodus, Cinderella and Jesus?

Correct Answer: They’re all redemption stories.

Redemption stories are everywhere.  I could rattle off dozens of redemption stories – even if you had a gun to my head and made me hop on one foot … barefoot in a puddle of hot vegetable oil.  I think you get the point: I love them.  But I have a hunch that everyone loves redemption stories, which is why we (i.e. every culture, not just Americans) keep telling old ones and making up new ones.

Every redemption stories has three basic movements:

1. A good beginning
2. A bad middle
3. A hopeful ending.

For a good beginning, think of Dorothy in Kansas surrounded by loving relatives and her doggie Toto.  Or think of the first lines of The Hobbit: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.  Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell … it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”  Ah, yes, sweet comfort.  Home.

Of course the Bible opens with one wallop of a good beginning – Adam and Eve in paradise.  But the Bible also contains smaller good beginnings, like the Book of Ruth.  There’s a famine in the land, but Elimelech decides to move his family to Moab. It’s a daring, dangerous move, but he’s going to make life work.  So with his wife and his two sons he treks to Moab.

God knows that we need some good beginnings.  A child’s birth, a little girl dreaming, a college grad ready for his first real job, a wedding dance, a new house, a move, a church plant – we need to receive and celebrate good beginnings.  They’re just flat-out good stories and I’m convinced that God loves them too.  Of course the only problem is that they never last … which leads to part 2.

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