MERRY CHRISTMAS --- TAKE HOPE

I'm more of an Advent than a Christmas day person but I do admit that I like the Christmas season. 

I like the lights and the trees and the decorations and the music and the food and the presents and the laughter. 

I like it that people get generous at this time of the year and I like it that for a time, brief though it be, our culture reaches out and touches others, especially children, and attempts to bring a season of hope to them. 

HOPE---What a great idea.  It may just be, in summary form, the purpose of the existence of the Church. 

What the world does once a year ought to be normal, everyday living in the Church the baby of Bethlehem founded.  Givers of hope, that's who we are; Sharers of hope...Benefactors of hope...Present in the world to bestow to others the one thing most needed in the human experience...HOPE. 

Long after the holidays the Church will still be open for business, sharing the Good News.  And, we'll do it not for any financial gain, as does a world gone materialistically mad.  We'll just do it for Jesus.  Why?  Because "we cannot help speaking about what we've seen and heard" (Acts. 4:20).

Merry Christmas; may you be filled with the God of hope.

RECOVERY, GARDNERS, AND EMPTY TOMBS

I heard the other day that there are two types of people in the world, those who are in recovery and those who know they are.  The truth is that all of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.  As a result we are not perfect, far from it, in fact.  We all have hang-ups, shortcomings, weaknesses, and brokenness, even those of us who dare say that God lives in us and that in Jesus we are forgiven.  It's true. God does, and we are.  However, not one of us has arrived, and in the words of Robert Frost we have "Miles to go before we sleep" (Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”).

A few weeks ago I felt led to get more involved in our Celebrate Recovery ministry at Montrose Church-Pasadena campus.  I've been around church for a lot of years now, and everywhere I have turned in my life and everywhere I find myself now, I see people, Christian people, people who are madly in love with Jesus Christ, who need to make Celebrate Recovery a part of their journey in Christ. 

CR is for everybody.  People who think they don't need accountability to others need CR.  CR isn't just for recovering alcoholics and people with chemical dependency.  CR is for people serious about their walk with Jesus, people who aren't afraid to look deep inside themselves and see the places of their wounded-ness, low self-esteem, food disorders, anger, bitterness, impatience, passive-aggressive need to control, negative self-talk, need for approval, the inner voice that says you're never enough, pride.  Name it.  People who have sinned and fall short of the glory of God need to be in safe communities of honest and recovering people.

In her book, Pastrix, Nadia bolz-weber speaks of Mary's encounter with a man whom she thought was the gardener at the empty tomb on that first Easter morning.  She write, 

     Perhaps Mary Magdalene thought the resurrected Christ was a gardener because Jesus still had the dirt from his own tomb under his nails.  Of course, the depictions in churches of the risen Christ never show dirt under his nails; they make him look more like a wingless angel than a gardener.  It's as if he needed to be cleaned up for Easter visitors so he looked more impressive and so no one would be offended by the truth.  But then what we all end up with is a perverted idea of what resurrection looks like.  My experience, however, is that the God of Easter is a God with dirt under his nails.
     Resurrection never feels like being made clean and nice and pious like in those Easter pictures.  I would have never agreed to work for God if I had believed God was interested in trying to make me nice or even good.  Instead, what I subconsciously knew…was that God was never about making me spiffy; God was about making me new.
     New doesn't always look perfect.  Like the Easter story itself, new is often messy.  New looks like recovering alcoholics.  New looks like reconciliation between family members who don't actually deserve it.  New looks like every time I manage to admit I was wrong and every time I manage to not mention when I'm right.  New looks like every fresh start and every act of forgiveness and every moment of letting go of what we thought we couldn't live without and then somehow living without it anyway.  New is the thing we never saw coming—never even hoped for—but ends up being what we needed all along.
     It happens to all of us.  God simply keeps reaching down into the dirt of humanity and resurrecting us from the graves we dig for ourselves through our violence, our lies, our selfishness, our arrogance, and our addictions.  And God keeps loving us back to life over and over (Pastrix, Jericho Books: New York, 2013, 173-174).     

Let me leave it here for now and simply invite you to a safe place called, "Celebrate Recover" where you will discover that God just keeps on coming to us over and over.  Rich or poor, male or female, young or old, educated or uneducated, you are invited.   There is a place for you at the table of Jesus.

See you down the road,

EVERY STORY IS A MIRACLE

In her book, Accidental Saints: Finding God in the all the wrong people, Nadia Bolz-Weber writes of how she thinks that "we're in a time in the life of the church where stories of failure are so much more important than stories of success" (203).  That goes against the grain for a lot of folks in the church, doesn't it?  We're always promoting the folks that succeed, getting them up-front to tell their stories. 

I'm not sure Jesus is always in that, though. The Church is filled with ordinary "Jars of clay" (See 2 Corinthians 4:7), who struggle with their humanity and their faith, every day.  These folks will, most likely, never be invited to share their story on some great stage.  Not everyone among us has bestseller stories.  We'll never be asked to go on tour, telling our story that sets audiences on fire with motivation.  That's too bad, too, because our Scriptures tell us that God shows up best in weak people, everyday folks who have stories of a thousand different kinds; real people who are broken and bruised and wounded and beaten down by life and who go about their lives, as best they can, with their eyes fixed on Jesus (Heb. 12:2), seeking to be faithful to the God who has come into the "earthen vessels" of their humanity and poured into them the "treasure of Jesus Christ" (2 Cor. 4:7).   

The problem with "up-front and paraded sainthood" is that those who don't have dramatic stories are shuffled out of the way so that those with great stories can take center stage.  Also, where did we come up with this show-and-tell Christianity?  Shouldn't it be that if Jesus has so changed your life that it merits, in the eyes of some, notoriety, promotion, books and speaking tours, that it would better serve the kingdom by getting down in the trenches and living out the implications of the Faith among the hurting, the disenfranchised, the broken and lost? 

Don't get me wrong. I love a good story. I love a solid rock testimony.  I love what Jesus does in the lives of people, and I thoroughly enjoy hearing all about it.  I just feel we need to be extraordinarily careful not to disenfranchise believers whose stories aren't the dramatic kind that can wow an audience. 

The truth is that all of our stories are dramatic if Jesus has succeeded in wooing us to the Father so that the Father can pour into us the wonders of His amazing grace.  Every story is a miracle; every one of them.  Each story is so miraculous that on the day any one of us embraced the embrace of God and came into the open arms of our Savior, heaven rejoiced (see Luke 15:10). 

We have the treasure of Jesus Christ in jars of clay (2 Cor. 4:7) which means that everyone of us in Christ can sing with John Newton,

Amazing grace! how sweet the sound

that saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now I'm found;

was blind, but now I see."

And Jesus said on our behalf, "Amen."

A MARVELOUS WONDER

A Devotional Thought

Being the people of God is a marvelous wonder. 

We live by faith and stake our lives on our faith being rooted and grounded in Truth, as that Truth is realized in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

We do what we believe God calls us to do and we live on the basis of the integrity we see in God revealed in Jesus.

We take the Bible seriously and read it as divine revelation.

We take creation seriously and seek to be stewards of the world into which God has placed us.

We take people seriously and seek to make a fair playing field for people of all races, creeds and colors.

We take morality seriously and seek to lead lives that reflect the goodness of God.

We take ethics seriously and seek to live honorably and nobly in our spheres of influence.

We're not perfect but the One who is, has taken hold of our hand and is leading us forward.

We may make mistakes but the One who doesn't lives within us holding us to a strict accountability that leads us to admit it when we fail, face it down, own it, and then do all we can to get it right.

We seek to live in response to God and not in that place of micro-managing God.

We seek not to bring God down to our brain's ability to comprehend Him, but to allow God to expand our capacities up so as to live in His infinite and creative imagination and power.

In the end, we are just folks who have become captivated by what we see when we look into the eyes of Jesus.  In response we have joined up with Him, taking one step at a time into the future.  It is an awesome journey and quite a ride.

In her 1971 book, Eighth Day of Creation, Elizabeth O'Connor shares this about the church she attended at that time, the Church of The Savior in Washington, D.C.

When we describe "Church" we like to say that it is a gift-evoking, gift-bearing community—a description based on the conviction that when God calls a person he calls him into the fullness of his own potential.  This is why "Church" implies a people; no one enters into the fullness of his being except in community with others persons.  No Community develops the potential of its corporate life unless the gifts of each of its members are evoked and exercised on behalf of the whole community. (Eighth Day of Creation, Word Books: Waco, Texas, p. 8)

In light of the fact that each person in the church is to exercise the gifts the Holy Spirit has given him or her, how would you define this aspect of being the Church.

Any thoughts?