A Good Idea at the Time

(This is a Christmas related story I wrote a few years ago based on middle of Luke chapter 2)

It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

The stone slaps a slow, tired rhythm against my flat feet. It sounds like the tired waves that fall to the shore on a too hot day that make you wonder if creation will have the energy to go on. Like the rocks along the shoreline, the stone beneath me that was once chiseled sharp and clean has been worn smooth by a thousand feet. But my path through it is the deepest. Time has worn me down as well. I'm not made of the stuff of stones. I should never have tried to play its part.

I was young then and full of life like a rutting ram. I didn't believe in old age then. Not my own, anyway. But I did believe in grander themes. I believed in a God who had made us a blessing. Not that we are such a prize. True, we are a proud, sturdy people. That's part of our problem. We are so proud that sometimes not even the very voice of God can call us away from our own plans.

But we are also a frightened people. Our fears are the fears of old men. We have built great cities and fought great battles, but the world has grown in and over us and we fear that silent time in the middle of the night when the wind comes and whispers in our ears, "Who are you? What will become of you now that your knees grow weak and your eyes have dried out?" Hard questions and uncomfortable for a practical people. We like our feet planted firmly on the ground. It's easier to push these questions aside and ask, "Where is our next meal to come from?" and pretend we are fearless.

I remember the day it all changed for me. I came to the temple as usual—well, perhaps not quite as usual. I was in a foul mood. I'd been cross with Ruth about some money that was missing. I accused her of being careless, but I found the money before I had left home. It was there where I'd put it and forgotten. Too stubborn to admit any fault, I didn't say anything to Ruth. I was still brooding, trying to find some way to avoid the blame. I went to the temple because it was the right thing to do—my father and all Israel's fathers had gone since we settled this land--but in my heart, I was not all that I could have been. I'm telling you all this so that there will be no mistake. What happened was not because I was such a good man.

If I had told anyone this back then, they would have laughed. I would have been accused of giving way to the vain visions of the young or worse, the visions of too much wine. Now, I've been here too long for anyone to laugh. All my friends have died and no one here remembers a day of their life when old Simeon wasn't shuffling around in the corner. There is no one left who knew me young.

That day my God sent his Spirit to me. There were no lights, the earth did not shake, but there was no mistaking the Spirit. It was like laying with a woman for the first time. The air was bright and alive like a cold, flowing stream. Each breath had to be bit off, swallowed and held down as if I had been plunged naked into that same stream. My heart threatened to burst my ribs. And there was a voice. It spoke in a whisper backed by the power of thunder. My people had been promised a day when God would visit us. On that day he would give us a new spirit. Our stubborn, rocky hearts would be worn away and we would be given a new heart that could rest with God and do what is right. It would be the beginning of a great peace. It would be good, and while we lived with hardship now, we all stretched out our necks out toward that day. The Spirit came to me and caressed me and promised. It promised that I would not taste death until that day came to pass.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. I was young and elastic. Now, my skin is stretched and flinty, my arms are thin and the wind taunts me with every step. It exposes my bony knees and picks at my dry eyes and laughs. It has been too long. Ruth is gone. The friends of my youth are all dust. In my youth, I would never have believed that there would come a day when I would long for, hurt for, that last, long sleep.

But just now, when my hope was as frail as my bones, I saw her. The whirlwind of people around the entrance to the temple parted for a moment and there she was. She clutched a small bundle of a child to her breast. Beside her was the husband carrying two doves. A sacrifice for the child, a consecration for the first born son. They weren't much to look at and I would have passed them by, but the wind pushed me forward. The mother looked up into my eyes from across the court. The voice of the wind whispered in my ear and I knew. This was the child.

I stumbled forward and caught the woman's arm. The husband moved to catch me, but she motioned him to wait. She unwrapped the child and held him before me and the world before me grew transparent like the ghostly vapors that play across the dessert in the late afternoon. I saw through the stones around me to what lay beyond. There was a whirlwind mounting that would strike my people. This was the child that would usher in everything that God had promised. It seemed too small a bundle to carry so much. When the whirlwind finally struck, it would raise many of the low and cause the high and proud to fall. That came as no surprise. When you have lived as long as I have, you realize that the world is in need of being turned upside down. But what I saw next made me want to crumble to the ground and hide my face and weep. This child was to be the glory of Israel, but Israel would speak against it. In the end reject it. But even though we would reject God's gift, God would not reject us. He would make a new Israel around this child with men and women from every nation. We would not be forgotten.

I realized that I had been standing, trembling before this young woman and her child like some senile old man. I put on a brave face and spoke words of blessing over the child. I described the good he would do before the bewildered parents. Surely they had to know that this was God's Son sent to save us from our pride and stubbornness and bring us back to God. But I wanted to spare them from the rest. Why bring tragedy to such an important day? Then for just a moment's time I saw her face as it would look that day when they broke her son. When God spoke the truth to my forefathers, he always spoke the whole truth. Nothing less would be honest. I spoke of her pain. Maybe it would lessen it a little if she were warned. But then I remembered that I had children of my own once. Nothing could have lessened my pain.

When I finished I felt as though the force of the earth bending my body down to the dust had been released. I almost believed I could fly. God had made a promise to me and he had kept it. My time was finished. There were tears of relief and joy in my eyes as I thanked the woman for her time. But there was awe at my last glimpse of the child's eyes. For the Spirit showed me one last thing. They were the eyes of a child and you could see the child behind them, but God was in there too.

I go away to die now. It's not a sad thing. There is no one left to say good-bye to. I'm tired and I want rest. I will see God soon. It really is comforting. Once it would have been frightening, but today I have had a preview. I've seen God's eyes and there is love there.

Stagnation is Cool... Then It Stinks

As a kid I loved exploration, poking and prodding the things that made up the life around me. One of my favorite activities was capturing and watching, bits and pieces of my environment. I had cans and bottles and jugs filled with a bit of the stream that ran through our backyard or of a lake or filled with random ingredients. I'd watch them to see what would become of these samples.

There were glorious surprises. A can with a bit of peach juice in the bottom would grow luxurious strands of grey mold. Swamp water would grow swarms of single-celled animals large enough to see with the naked eyes. Strange, wiggling life forms would begin to emerge from algae-choked jars of water.

It was great for a couple of days, but then the inevitable happened. Decay set in. The stench of death dimmed my fascination. The wiggly things turned out to be mosquito larvae, and I didn't want to be around when they morphed into winged predators with a taste for my blood.

Stagnation has a limited appeal, and what was true for my early nature experiments is true for faith. I have a goal. It has actually sparked concern and alarm among traditionalists at times. I want my view of the world and of God to go through some radical change every two years or so. If not, I feel nervous.

Why? Because I don't want to stagnate. I'm not looking for some new and radical truth that no one else has ever been able to figure out. Originality is not my goal. I'm looking for understanding that is new to me. God is so big, his wisdom so vast, his understanding so far beyond me that I never want to be content with what I already know.

Spiritual stagnation comes when we stop exposing ourself to fresh opportunities for insight. What was in my jars died because they were cut off from new nourishment. They had become a closed system unable to survive. Each little environment consumed itself and died. My spiritual growth is dependent on an open system. Nourishment comes from God and his Spirit. That may seem sufficient, but it is not. God has chosen to work through his people to add to our, (if you will allow me to stretch out the analogy), spiritual nutrition.

The ‘me and Jesus’ model of spirituality can't be found in Scripture. Instead, we are given people who are gifted as pastors, teachers, and more, to instruct and train us (Eph 4:11-13). We are gifted by the Holy Spirit to minister to each other (1 Cor 12:7-11). These influences come from those immediately around me, or have been preserved by the writing of people such as Augustine, Luther, N. T. Wright, Timothy Keller, or Andy Stanley (This is not a comprehensive list).

God's truth is eternal, and my understanding is eternally lacking. If I don't work to push out the boundaries of my understanding, then I'll merely consume what I already know. If I don't challenge my assumptions, then God will not be able to correct the half truths that I carry with me. Tradition will replace a dynamic life. If I don't continue to ask, seek, and knock, if I'm not willing to test what I think I know while being open to be proven wrong (while God is proven right), then I will stagnate and never know the true meaning of abundant life.

Christmas: Focus Beyond the Family

The practice of celebrating Christmas began as a community festival to celebrate the birth of Christ much like Easter was already celebrated. It was a worship gathering and a festival to be shared. In our individualistic culture it has shrunk from the community celebration to a family gathering. This has changed the celebration in many ways and taken some of what is special and redemptive out of Christmas.

Jesus' birth marks the beginning of a new people a new stage in God's work to establish his Kingdom on earth. Jesus' life exemplifies Jesus' love; his death and resurrection establish the possibility of being united with God; and the gift of his Holy Spirit unite us together as the new community of God. As Paul says when describing communion, "And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf." (1 Cor 10:16-17) Our individual commitment to Jesus leads to a new corporate reality where love, care, and forgiveness are actively practiced.

The celebration of Jesus' birth should be a celebration of his mission. No wet blanket here. Celebrations are a good thing. God gave Israel feast days to celebrate and remember his great works. The work isn't finished, but that doesn't mean that we should be miserly in our celebration of Jesus' decisive and game changing acts. God's promises were fulfilled in Jesus and the angels heralded Jesus' birth as the day everything began to change.

But Christmas is also a day to remember that the Kingdom has not yet been fully established. Many believers come from broken, damaged, and damaging families. As a community we encourage, heal, and give hope. As individuals, people remain alone. Many twenty-somethings are separated from their families due to jobs, education, and even missions. Young professionals today tend to be more isolated. Many of this generation are now labeled nomadic Christians because they have ceased to belong, but maybe our focus on the nuclear family, orphans those who don't have a nuclear family of their own. Families are important, but the New Testament places its emphasis on the gathered community of God.

Christmas was also a time to remember the poor and the abused. To include the outsider. It was not seen as the one day to make up for ignoring the poor the rest of the year. Instead, it was a reminder that God's justice was meant for all, a reminder of how we were to live the rest of the year. It was a reminder that God expected more of us than to be good capitalists. The pagan villain of Dickens', A Christmas Carol was a great capitalist. He would have made modern writers like Ayn Rand proud.

I don't reject capitalism. It has much to commend it. But any "ism" must be tempered by God's wisdom and love. God's love doesn't only extend to the poor, the forgotten, and the abused, but it even embraces my enemy. And it extends - and this is hard in today's protective political climate - to the stranger, the immigrants among us.

How do we celebrate and care for those around us without wearing ourselves out or giving up in despair? We do it together as communities. Christmas doesn't really have to be less than a feast, a time with family, and even a football game. But it can be so much more. Presents aren't necessarily an evil, but people are more important. Together, Christmas can be an active celebration of God turning back the curse, of love breaking into the world, and a foretaste of what God has in store for us. Christmas was meant to be a public, community feast and celebration that reminds the world who we hope in and what we hope for. Enjoy it together.

Lessons from C. S. Lewis for Today (His Birthday)

Today marks the 113th year since C. S. Lewis was born, and his writing is still making a major impact on the lives of people throughout the world. PreChristians and Christians alike read and are influenced by his work while much of today's Christian writing and media does not engage the world. Why is that?

The first reason is that C. S. Lewis wrote for the world. He was not writing for the already convinced. He was not writing for Christian bookstores and Christian critics. He was writing to inspire the imagination of people who did not agree with him. He wanted to inform people who were skeptical. Too often today, our communication is aimed at the convinced. When that is the case, we take too much for granted, we assume too much prior knowledge from our audience, and we become combative rather than inspirational.

Most of Lewis' work first appeared in public media. He had to connect to an unbelieving audience or the paper would stop asking him for his columns and radio stations would stop giving him air time. Captive audiences inspire laziness and inhibit creative and persuasive thought. Good outreach, inspiration, teaching, and communication is most likely to happen when we are competing to be heard along with all the other voices in the world. Then we need to push our creativity, our ability to find common ground with others, and our ability to relate to felt needs and interests. C. S. Lewis became a master of this. The power of his writing comes in part to the fact that he wasn't singing for the choir.

Lewis also had a strong respect for the truth. He wasn't interested in propaganda. He wanted God to peel back the curtain and reveal to him what was real. In this, he was never guilty of a secular/sacred split. All truth was God's truth. This meant that he went to the Bible to understand who God is, who we are on a fundamental level, and what are purpose in the universe is, but he didn't limit himself to the Bible. He was a professor of literature and knew that art was a powerful tool to explore truth. He drew quite a bit from history and philosophy and, somewhat, on science. He had little patience for people who thought they could learn science, medicine, engineering from scripture. Scripture is the highest authority on those things that God directly addresses, but we are made in the image of God and are given other tools to explore the ordered creation that God has provided us with. This added credibility to his writing.

C. S. Lewis did not neglect his Christian learning, though. He once said that nothing he wrote was original. I thought this was just false modesty until I began to read the Christian classics. More often, than I would have imagined, Lewis is translating the thoughts of Augustine or Aquinas into modern language and applying them to our current situation. Lewis' grounding in the Bible and Christian thought was the bedrock of everything he wrote. Originality is highly valued today, Lewis applied originality only after he had walked the well trod path of Christian scholarship.

I think the most powerful tool that Lewis brought to the table was his imagination and love of story. It seems that most of our communication today reflects the cold logic of the modern era. The Bible is a story, Jesus conveyed most of his message in story, yet we tend to turn the dynamic story of the gospel into a set of philosophical principles. Lewis loved and respected logic, but he loved passion, story, imagery, and metaphors more. Logic points to truth that can be contained while story and metaphor speaks of mysteries that cannot be contained. It is the latter that inspires. I'm not sure how you can communicate the wonder of the gospel unless you love story. If you don't appreciate fiction or history I can't imagine how you connect with or inspire those in the world. I don't think C. S. Lewis could either, and I'm thankful for that.

Typewriter or Laptop?

Okay, let's have a show of hands. If you had to write a term paper, and you had access to both a laptop and a typewriter, who would choose the typewriter? Of course you would choose the computer. I remember the days of correcting fluid and carbon paper, of stuck keys, and old ribbon. Who would want put in all that work just to have one hard copy that was easily eaten by the dog?

Okay, I have a few friends that would stubbornly holdout for the typewriter, but that says more about their character, their desire to stand out just for the sake of standing out, their need for an excuse to fall back on when they don't complete their paper, their belief that suffering is an end in itself.

Where is the source of my strength? One of the reasons I follow Jesus is that he brings a computer to the table when life only offers a typewriter, but that does me little good if I just keep right on using the typewriter. Jesus brings more to the table regardless of how good my life may seem at the moment, but I must choose to pursue the strength he offers.

God's strength comes from three sources: Scripture, personal prayer and worship, and the Christian community. Scripture is the primary way that God's Spirit communicates with us, revealing his will, encouragement, and guidance. God shapes and molds us through personal prayer and worship. We get to recognize his voice and touch so he can guide us throughout the rest of our lives. And, surprisingly, it's through the gathered Christian community that God chooses to minister to us individually.

1 Corinthians 12 - 14 describes God's desire for dynamic communities whose members actively care for each other. Where we gather with gifts supplied by God to fulfill each need while others come with gifts for us. It is God's decision that he will supply most of our strength, growth, encouragement, and healing through each other. The God of love has decided that we will participate in his works of grace. In this way, we learn to love each other as we learn to love God. There was a day when we looked toward a place, the mountain of God, to see where our strength would come from. We still look to that same God, but now he no longer works from a distance. He works intimately through a combination of Scripture, prayer, and his community.

If we look anywhere else for our strength, then we have chosen the typewriter when God has provided us with a laptop. Of the three, I think the community is the one most neglected today, although all three are suffering as we choose politics, social engineering, culture wars, and peer pressure over God's guidance (I am speaking to Christians here). Among younger Christians we see the rise of nomadic Christianity, the idea that we can live our life apart from the church and still love God. This cuts them off from one of the main sources of strength.

I don't blame them too much, though. For many, church is an activity that is done once or twice a week. It is more a performance to be attended, a lecture to ingest, than it is an active time of interacting with each other. There should be times of teaching and community worship, but there should be more. A community shares in each other's lives, cares for each other, suffers through each other's mistakes and growing pains, shares each other's joys and suffering, doubts and insights. A community is dynamic.

If you are a follower of Jesus, community is not a suggestion but a command. Flee authoritarian, bitter, controlling communities, but don't give up on God's plan, on God's values. If you have been burned, then start with just a few trusted friends. If you go to church, then start with a few from within that group and begin to live the church. If not, then you better like carbon paper and correction fluid.

Community, Strangers, and Old People's Snacks

I didn't like church as I was growing up, and it didn't grow on me over time. In fact, the tension grew until I could leave it behind.

I didn't particularly like dressing up on Sundays. I wasn't into sitting still for an hour or more while the adults participated in something I didn't quite understand. The music was strange, and the coffee hour was full of old-people's snacks.

But that wasn't what bothered me most. The biggest problem was spending time with people I didn't know. The only time we saw each other was on Sundays. Somehow, our paths never crossed during the week. There were no social calls, no shared events, no shared missions... except work day at the church once or twice a year.

The message was simple. The church meeting was important, but the people? Not so much.

The idea that the church could be described as a building is alien to the New Testament. A persecuted group doesn't hang a big sign outside a regular meeting place to advertise to the authorities where they can be found and gathered up for prison.

Equally alien would be the idea that the church was a denomination or a system of governance. Even a quick reading of Paul's letters shows that the early church was out of its depth and still trying to work through this new thing God had done.

In Scripture, the church is people. It is a group of people who have given their lives to Jesus, have been united by the Holy Spirit, and are called to love and serve each other as they work together to establish the Kingdom of God.

Today, we hear a lot about nomad Christians. An emerging generation who accept Jesus as their Lord, but have abandoned the church. This is a problem for at least two reasons (in fact, there are several more). The first is that the call to committed community is Jesus' idea. It is his intention that we come together to serve each other and serve the world in a cooperative fashion. To say that Jesus is Lord and then not follow him is a contradiction in terms. Jesus called us to reform our priorities and our way of life.

But another problem must be addressed. Are we the church or are we just having church? Many youth are walking away because their church experience looks a lot like mine did growing up. If church is impersonal, driven by activities that keep people busy without them connecting personally, divided up into small speciality groups (age, activity, interest) so that a larger community doesn't emerge, if it's all about information transfer instead of encouragement and a shared, personal journey then it will become impersonal. If the emphasis is on right doctrine, but there is no room to share doubts, struggles, or to question, then personal growth has taken a back seat to "getting a good grade" in church.

We have "focused on the family" when God asked us to focus on the community. Jesus told us that families would be divided because of their belief in him, but he came to create new community. Which is the priority then?

There is no Christianity without the gathered, connected people of God. "For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body---whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free---and we were all given the one Spirit to drink." (I Corinthians 12:13) There must be a real, personal connection to the body. But we must ask two questions: First, am I really willing to respond to Jesus' authority and follow him? Second, has church become another activity and obligation like work or soccer practice, or is the church part of my relational identity, a group of people I work to get to know and love, people I've included in my larger life?

If the faith that Jesus established is still going to be influential for the next generation then these questions have to be dealt with.

No More Bite-Sized Gospel

The gospel is not something you can explain in three minutes. You can introduce it in three minutes, but if you can explain it that quickly, your gospel is too small. I believe it is the practice of presenting the gospel as a small thing, to be consumed in bite-sized pieces, that partially explains why the church is losing so many youth as they move from high school to adulthood.

The Bible is more than John 3:16 and the twenty or thirty favorite stories we like to repeat. God has used this scripture to inspire great writers such a Dostoevsky, J. R. R. Tolkien, Annie Dillard, T. S. Eliot, and Waker Percy. It has shaped great thinkers such as Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and contemporaries such a Peter Kreeft. It has inspired great art and influenced the shape of modern science, medicine, and law.

A small gospel doesn’t seem to stand up well against worldviews that have been well thought through (they may contain error, but they have been given thought). The tragedy is God has given us so much more to chew on, has addressed all the great questions of life, and presented us with more than enough to feed and inspire us for a lifetime.

Real classes and teaching need to replace our short commercial moments for God.

I know the first objection, because I get it often. Youth have the attention span of a chipmunk. Really? Are you sure.

Several years ago I was asked to teach at a large youth retreat. I’m a college missionary, and I hadn’t felt comfortable with high school students. To make matters worse, this retreat included middle school students. I never thought I connected well with this audience, but I agreed to speak.

I brought some musicians and a drama team for a “hip” factor. I don’t do hip well.

I was given several 90 minute teaching blocks. 90 minutes? Even with music and drama, that still left me with over 45 minutes to fill. As the youth groups began to arrive, each youth leader pulled me aside. “Our group only has about a ten minute attention span,” they warned. I was polite, but inside I wanted to ask, “Then why did you give me 90 minute teaching blocks?”

I approached this retreat differently, though. I remembered my audience. I know what they talk about among friends at school. We tiptoe around topics that they talk about openly elsewhere, and it makes us sound naive and foolish. Worse, it makes God seem naive and foolish. I decided to talk to them like they were college students, to be frank and shoot just a little over their heads. I talked about things that mattered to them in straightforward, frank terms.

The result was that I had a group of middle school and high school students that were engaged and focused throughout the long teaching blocks.

Content matters. If you have a few that don’t engage, then create something else for them. But don’t keep aiming for the least interested. You will lose the majority for the rebellious few. Reward faithfulness and you will create faithfulness. Focus your best attention on the slackers and the message is clear: slackers mean more to you than the faithful. Find a way to reach both, but give your best to the faithful. That’s Jesus’ model.

If the idea of diving into these topics deeper, of reading the great theologians, or wrestling with the big questions just makes you feel tired, then you don’t really believe in the life-giving qualities of God’s truth. Devotion to God is... well, devotion, commitment, taking the place of the students before we simply cover our preconceptions with religious trappings and present it to the world as God’s truth. That may seem harsh, but if we treat God like a hobby, then we will have little to offer.