Sell! Sell! Sell!

Jesus was never particularly soft on rich people.  “Good teacher,” the young man asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” 

His question is one that all the faithful ask at one time or another; the rich young ruler’s words are echoed in my own thoughts.  His question resounds with the individuality that we’ve come to expect today; it is doused with a liberal dose of flattery.  “What must I do…?”  There is no need to hear what anyone else should do; the only important person is me.  All the others who are listening are inconsequential to me because I have everything – I am young, I am rich and I am in charge of a rabble much like this. I know just enough to be dangerous and I am pious enough to fake my way through the religious shallows of life.

I stand back in the shadows of this story, smirk on lips, as Jesus brings this arrogant young man back to reality.  Enough of the flattery – don’t presume to know who I am by simply because you’ve heard my name in the streets:  “Why do you call me good?”  You don’t know anything about me.  You’ve been raised in a religious family.  You can repeat the commandments, I’m sure – “Do not commit adultery.”  Interesting that Jesus puts this commandment first for the rich man because he is probably unaware that his own love affair with himself and his wealth had broken the back of the commandments in his life for most of his adult existence.   “Do not murder, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and your mother.”

Jesus doesn’t even put the commandments in the right order.  Didn’t he ace his confirmation lessons? 

My guess is that Jesus was watching this young man very closely.  Inwardly, the young man might be checking off the list of the commandments on his fingers and piously - and shallowly - examining his own life. 

You can almost see him blowing on his knuckles and polishing them on his chest.  “All these I have kept since I was a boy.”  Maybe his voice was raised so that the entire crowd could witness the blessing that would be coming from the ‘good teacher’ for his righteousness from birth.  It was obvious, wasn’t it, that he was born under a lucky star – fame, fortune and glory followed him.  Now, it was only a matter of time that God’s almighty presence would bestow spiritual glory also.”

“You still lack one thing,” Jesus says. 

Standing the in the back of the crowd, the shadows wrapping me and my voice like a blanket, hiding me from the rich ruler’s eyes, “Yes, Jesus, give it to him.  He lacks humility.  He lacks empathy.  He lacks generosity.  He lacks all the good things that any self-respecting Christian would covet – peace, patience, meekness" – I use my fingers as counting tools, checking them off in my own external judgment of this man that I so desperately want to be.  I want his looks, his past, his future, his money – I feel dis-comfortable with my own lack of resources which make me doubt God’s existence and blessing.

And in my own casting of the first stone, I would guess that Jesus eyes turn towards me and he points the same finger at me, “Sell everything you have and give it to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven.  Then come, follow me.”

To contemporary western Christian culture there are no harder words that Jesus spoke.  Sell everything – not just the things that you’ve outgrown and grown to dislike – but everything.  Sell it all and give it to the poor.

Surely Jesus isn’t serious.  Selling everything would swap me positions with the poor.  Then I would be one of them.  Then I would have to depend on other people.  Then I would have to depend on God…

Then, I get it.  The impossibility of the scenario that Jesus places before us is that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God – whatever (and wherever) that is.  All the storing up that I’ve done for myself, my addiction to having enough for tomorrow and the next day, all the manna that has fallen from heaven into my lap, the blessing of God’s daily goodness, has been stored up and rotted because I have collected so much stuff that I no longer need God. 

My soul has begun to decompose under the detritus weight of my idolatry.

Those that no longer need God no longer see the kingdom of heaven as a treasure and they then fail to realize that the pressure of protecting the things with which they been gifted is a betrayal of God’s blessing in and to this world.  When all of our treasures on earth are rusting and our clothing becomes moth-eaten and moldy, we recognize how traitorous we have become.

Back to the garage sale, I guess.  

If Jesus says to the rich man (and I certainly am one of those attempting to hide in the crevices of affluence) “Go and sell all that you have and give to the poor,” I guess it’s time for one more excruciating episode of hauling what I once thought to be treasures out the door to be sold on the pavement of my driveway for less than one hundredth of what I bought them for.  Each item, whether table or table cloth, with memory attached, will be priced to sell.  Early morning garage sailors will be swarming around our lane, picking through our things before we’ve even put up the sign.  I want to slap their hands away, chastise them for their rudeness because I know in my heart of hearts that they aren’t the poor that Jesus is talking about.  I pull out the garage sale chair, watch baseball with my little girls,and hope that Jesus can see my sad face as all these memories are sold.

But then I read a little farther in the New Testament, in I Corinthians 13, the amazingly repeated scripture that is used ad nauseum at almost every wedding that I’ve officiated.  Almost always we start at verse four: love is patient and kind – check… but almost always we skip the first three verses.

Let me show you the most excellent way.

If I speak in tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

 

Shedding my things might be hard, but added to the recipe is a full measure of love.  That might be even more difficult.  But when we truly understand love in this world, a love that always looks outward and away from self: an agape kind of love expressed by God in his son, Jesus, the pain of loss morphs into something different.

Joy.

Not happiness.  But joyful contentedness in whatever might happen and the true blessing of shedding that which is conceivably dearest to me is a genuine need to depend on God and others.  In those dependent relationships we find freedom.  Strange, isn’t it?  The bondage of mammon enslaves us to selfishness, but the freedom of a Christian binds us to God.

What's in your Wallet?

The organ at the small country church where I serve does not run on electricity.  Before electric organs made an appearance, pump organs were all the rage.  As the organist pulls the stops out and plays the keys, her (or his) feet are in constant motion pumping the foot pedals to force air into a bladder which in turn pushes air through the pipes creating the sound.  These pump organs aren’t (and never were) designed for contemporary Christian hymns and even though some traditional churches try to play the modern songs on the pump organ, they sound much better bellowing out the old standards.  Remember those old songs?  How Great Thou Art.  Rock of Ages.  Amazing Grace.  Without even trying, the mournful sound of the pump organ returns to my brain and I hear the one song that defined my childhood churchgoing years:

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine.  O what a foretaste of glory divine.  Heir of salvation, purchase of God, born of his Spirit, washed in his blood.

This is my story, this is my song.  Praising my Savior all the day long.  This is my, this is my song.  Praising my Savior all the day long.

The melody soars as the tune carries us along promising everything in the covenant.  We are heirs of every good thing that God has for us.  And yet most of us only know the first verse and the first words.

Blessed assurance.

I have lots of cards in my wallet.  Each one of them promises something to me.  They assure me because I bear this card, I can use it in time of need.  Beyond my driver’s license, I would guess that my most important card is my insurance card.  If anything were to happen to me (God forbid – as if by saying those words ‘God forbid’ I am somehow forbidding God to allow things to happen to me) I can be taken to the hospital, looked after, cared for, be fed and treated,

And I don’t have to pay a thing – well, that’s not entirely true. 

I just have to pay the premiums and show them the card.  Kind of like a Get Out of Jail Free card in Monopoly.  I can do whatever I want; I can buy whatever I want and if I get in any kind of trouble that would fence me in, I just show them my nice card.

That’s what some people think faith in Jesus is like.  It is something like the picture of a benevolent Jesus smiling down on us from above not caring a bit what our daily lives are like.  As long as we have the Jesus card, we can get out of jail for free.  We can do whatever we like; we can buy whatever we want and if we find ourselves in a place where we are locked in, just flash them Jesus shining face.  Manipulate the system however you want.  Didn’t Jesus say have abundant life?  Have the best of all worlds.

Mark Sayers , in his book The Road Trip that Changed the World, calls this new type of believer ‘atheistic Christians’ who profess their dedication to God on Sundays or in certain places that require their Jesus faces, but the rest of the time they live as if there is no God.  Or, if there is, he certainly agrees with all of their decisions.

They don’t really care because they’ve got

Blessed Insurance. 

Insurance is something that you have to have but something you hope you never have to use.

It’s interesting that the hymn, Blessed Assurance, has three verses and the first verse only uses the phrase ‘blessed assurance’ once.  Yes, we understand the promise of grace given to us.  But, the second two verses start with the words, ‘Perfect Submission.’ 

Submission.  Ugh.  The word that no one likes to hear.  Submit.  Put others before you.  Assurance demands submission to the one greater than yourself. 

When Satan gave Jesus the opportunity to test God to see if he really was there, Jesus response was one of submission.  Jesus didn’t need to test the adequacy of God’s steadfastness; in the mission of submission, Jesus was simply called to trust.  It is enough.  Through submission, we lose the need to feed not only ourselves.  We look outward to those who do not yet know that they’ve found a winning lottery ticket in the back alley behind their house.  The card that says, ‘You’ve won it all.’  Now go and share.

This is my story, this is my song.  For that, I’ll praise my savior all the day long.

Hunger

 

There are three kinds of hunger that humans have to deal with on a daily basis.  Some of the world battles with physical hunger, a portion of the western world loses the battle to psychological hunger and almost no one pays attention to spiritual hunger.

I’ve never really been hungry before.  That’s not to say that my stomach has relayed a message to my brain that it is, indeed, time to refuel.  Usually, though, the message is not that I’m running on empty, it is simply that my body has gotten used to eating at certain times of day.  The psychology of hunger kicks in: I am not hungry because I am hungry; I am hungry because I’m supposed to be hungry.

It is said that Australians eat five times per day and that when they do eat, it is in moderation – small proportions to take the edge off the gnawing edges of the belly.  My own stomach has grown used to this repetitive encouragement of filling my gullet and I find that even though I may have eaten a large breakfast, the Australian system of eating would require that I eat something at 10:30.   They call it morning tea.  I call it justified gluttony.  I’m not being harsh, but I’m not sure that the body needs to eat every two hours in order to wash down an inordinately small cup of tea.  As I raise my pinky finger and gaze around at the rest of those partaking, I think to myself, This is completely cultural.  If I don’t cram a scone smothered in Strawberry jam and whip cream down my throat, they will be offended.  I’m sophisticated, too.  You can tell by the four ounce cup of tea in my right hand.

They call it having a ‘cuppa.’  Just like every other phrase in Australia, it is shortened as if saying the words, ‘let’s have a cup of tea,’ would be too exhausting. 

Let’s have a cuppa while we discuss hunger, shall we?  Give me a second while I butter up two pieces of toast because I haven’t eaten for thirty-nine minutes.

In Western cultures, for the most part, we don’t have to worry as much with physical hunger.  By and large, we have enough food to go around fifty times over, but if we ever actualized what hunger does to us, we might be a little more careful with the way we spread around the calories.

I once led a youth group event where my high school kids had to come to church to stay overnight.  These events are called ‘lock-ins’ because once the youth have arrived they are not allowed to leave the premises of the church – essentially, they are locked in.  We had been doing a month long theme of understanding the epidemic of homelessness that pervaded the southwest portion of the United States.  Because winter is relatively short and not very harsh, many transient people made their way to the southwest to live out their months on the streets living in cardboard boxes, cooking over open fires started in fifty-five gallon drums. 

Because we had been studying life on the streets, our overnight at the church would go with the theme of homelessness.  In order to attend the event, the kids ‘entry fee’ was a can of food from their parents’ pantry which would be, in turn, used at the local homeless shelter.  Little did the kids know that the church would be the homeless shelter. 

As the youth arrived, everything that they had brought for the twelve hours of the lock-in (about ten changes of clothes, jewelry, perfume, walkmans (yes, it was the 90’s), snacks, extra bags of just-in-case) would be stashed in my office.  Essentially, we were making them homeless.  Earlier in the day, the chaperones and I had traveled around Mesa stopping at appliance stores gathering large boxes which would be the kids’ homes (and beds) for the night.  There would be no entertainment – no movies, no planned games, no MTV – nothing.  The kids had to fend for themselves and the only thing that they were allowed to eat for the night was the can of food that they brought. 

The kids were not informed of this particularity before they arrived.

We had a large contingent show up that night.  As usual, parents who normally have nothing to do with the life of the church dropped their kids off early, squealing off into the desert sunset, heading home to disconnect their phones so as not to be interrupted during a teenager free night. 

As the kids arrived, about forty of them, they were asked to pile up all of their belongings in a corner of the auditorium.  The cans of food that they had carried with them were to be placed in the kitchen window.  I smirked as I saw what the kids had brought for the night.  It was as I suspected – they had rummaged through their parents cupboards picking out those things that they most hated at home; cans of spinach, beets, creamed corn, a jar of pickled onions.  This was what they would be cooking for the night.  Cooking, that is, if they could figure out how to get the cans open.

A few kids showed up that I guessed would be difficult.  Dennis already had been arrested for auto theft – he was thirteen; his brother Manny was already flirting with the idea of being part of a Phoenix gang; two girls, Darla and Hannah, who had already perfected professional flirting and as they would be the oldest ones there were probably thinking that any young male would be fair game. 

I prayed a little prayer for me.

Priceless was the moment when we began to take away their belongings.  Dennis thought it was funny as Darla and Hannah began to moan loudly that they wouldn’t be able to change clothes for the night.  Desperately they tried to stop us, asking for just a few moments to pick through their bags for ‘necessities.’  To no avail.  We stayed strong.

Then, to top it all off, the largest complaint came when we told them the menu for the night.  As their eyes focused on what they had brought, it finally hit them: these are the things that we hate to eat and yet we were going to foist them off to the homeless people as if somehow they should just be thankful that we gave what we did.  Hungry people should just be happy that we are so generous.  Hungry people shouldn’t be so picky.   They were going to be hungry and they were going to perhaps understand, even just a little bit, what happens when you aren’t fed.

When people get hungry, they do things they normally wouldn’t do – even kids.  As they didn’t want to partake of spinach and beets, they decided to wait out the night and into the morning.  But as the kids noticed the edge of hunger, the anger manifested itself in other ways.  They began to fight – two boys almost got into fisticuffs over a refrigerator box.  They began to argue – a couple of the kids were not happy that can of spinach was distributed so sparsely.  They began to get tired; they learned that homelessness and hunger are not holidays from societal responsibilities, but usually structural identities put in place by ruling authorities. 

Hunger changes whole cultures.

2 Kings 6:24-30

Some time later, Ben-Hadad, king of Aram, mobilized his entire army and marched up and laid siege to Samaria.  There was a great famine in the city; the siege lasted so long that a donkey’s head sold for eighty shekels of silver and a half pint of dove’s dung sold for five.  As the king of Israel was passing by on the wall, a woman cried to him, “Help me, my lord the king.”

The king replied, “If the Lord does not help you, where can I get help for you?  From the threshing floor?  From the winepress?”  Then he asked her, “What’s the matter?”

She answered, “This woman said to me, ‘Give up your son so that we may eat him today, and tomorrow we’ll eat my son.’  So we cooked my son and ate him.  The next day I said to her, ‘Give up your son so we may eat him,’ but she had hidden him.”

When the king heard the woman’s words, he tore his robes.  As he went along the wall, the people looked, and there, underneath, he had sackcloth on.

There, is real hunger – so violently present, that the people would do anything to not be hungry.  Anything – including eating their future, their children, their hope – anything.

This is not one of the Bible stories told in any Sunday school class that I’ve ever been involved in, but it is a biblical story that speaks to our present time.  We are a hungry people, a starving people, a people so hungry that we would even consume our children’s future so that we can stave off this incredible sense of emptiness that is gnawing at the edges of our consciousness.  We hunger for the Word of God, and God himself, but we are not even conscious of it.

When the devil said, ‘Turn these rocks into bread,’ Jesus response was not just, ‘No thanks, even though that sounds good, I’ll refrain,’ he also had a lesson for Satan. 

“Humankind cannot live on bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” 

Yes, it is true that humans can, and do, live without consuming the Bread of Life, but are they really alive?  Are they really living abundant life?

And without knowing it, while starving for the Word of life, society begins to consume its children.  Not physically, of course, but emotionally and spiritually.  Because we don’t offer Daily Bread as the main course, (we don’t even offer breadcrumbs to the kids), they begin to hunger for everything else.  Because they have no sense of the Word of God and its importance or essentialness for life, they learn to consume each other.

In the end, the devil has what he wanted in the first place:  sustainable, perpetual and unrecognized emptiness.

The consumption of our youth is visible in the church’s statistics:  Only one percent of youth have an active faith in Jesus Christ. 

In a Christian studies class, a discussion arose from a group of eight grade students wondering about the realities of the Creation story in the book of Genesis.  The discussion took place mostly between four students; the rest of them stared out the windows, drew pictures on their spiral bound notebooks or picked their noses.  Ideas floated back and forth – a literal understanding of Creation is the only one that works.  No, no, said one student.  There is too much scientific evidence to support that the world is much more wonderfully made than in six days.  Another student questioned the reality of how Adam and Even could bring out the entire human race from their genetic material.

At the sound of Adam and Eve’s names, one young boy at the very back of the class raised his hand and asked,

“You keep talking about this Adam and Eve.  Who are they?  Are they from the Lockyer Valley?”

The physical, psychological and spiritual hunger has enveloped our children in a cloud of despair and we, as adults, have done very little about it.  We have simply replied to the starving,

‘What can we do about it?  If God can’t feed them, how can we?  We’ll just put on our mourning clothes and rue the day the world changed.  We’ll reminisce about the good old days when families came to church, when there was no soccer on Sundays, when this new fangled device called the mobile phone didn’t interrupt existence.  We can’t do anything about this.’

It’s the great Christian cop out that we hold in our hands the Bread of Life, that which can feed the entire world, and we are reluctant to distribute it.  Even knowing Jesus had extraordinary powers to replicate and multiply the power of God through the Bread of Life, we are unable at best, and unwilling at worst, to save this generation of young people from starving. 

The Church is in need of transition also – to lose the mantle of yesterday’s wonder years and gain a whole new generation with dreams and visions for the future of God’s kingdom. 

Let’s feed them.

Later, as Jesus transitions us from humans who struggle with an understanding of scarcity, we will look at God’s abundance and what it means for a wide-eyed world who, for the first time in decades, may never have heard of the saving love of Jesus Christ.  But for now, let’s move to the next temptation to overcome – assurance.

A Few Days in the Wilderness

Excerpt from Chapter 4.

 

To be alone is one thing.  To endure it is another.

The foundation of western culture is an attempt to make life easier.  Progress is the currency of the lazy.  Over the last twenty years, innovation has created a culture that believes it no longer has to exert any energy.  Even the commute to work has now been subsumed by the early morning traffic on the digital superhighway.  Instead of stopping at Starbucks, McDonalds or any other coffee shop that requires a guaranteed loan to get an eight ounce cup of coffee, many flip the switch on their own coffee machine.  If they are innovative enough, they will have already purchased a coffee maker that can be set for a certain time in which to turn on.  At 8:45, hot cup of steaming coffee in hand, many workers stumble twenty feet to their office chair where they park themselves for the next ten hours stopping only to refill the coffee cup.  Some don’t even change out of their pajamas to go to work.

We have electric toothbrushes, digital watches, automatic vacuum cleaners and, of course, the ubiquitous mobile device that allows you to be connected to the world at all times but disconnected from reality at the same time.  No longer is there any stress of communication: if you don’t want to expend the energy to talk to someone, text them.  If you don’t want to read a book, Google the notes.  If you don’t want to play a CD (what’s that?) you can instantly download individual songs without having to ‘waste’ time looking for it in your CD (what’s that?) tower. 

We have sacrificed patience on the altar of progress.

When we look at the story of Jesus in the wilderness, repeating, day after day, the discipline of preparation for his vocation, the modern mind would think, why forty days?  Why couldn’t Jesus just download the savior program from his father and be ready for the next day?

When an employee is new to a business, often there is a training process.  Usually the trainee is subjected to a certain number of hours of ‘how to’ and ‘what not to do.’  More often than not, this is done either online or by video.  You would be lucky if you were only subjected to four hours.  Most of what you learn through the videos is disposable; they are simply things that the hiring body must do so that they aren’t liable later on.

The most important thing you learn?  Make the boss happy any way that you can.  Avoid being responsible for anything.  Repeat this phrase: It’s not what you know – it’s who you know.

It’s not in the plan for Jesus.  His testing is part of the on-the-job-training.  In the midst of the six week course (yes, six weeks!) he is given worst case scenarios to check on his response time.  Temptation by the devil?  Probably every day and it’s not as if the devil shows up and says, ‘Hey, Jesus, I know that you are ravenously hungry after two weeks without food, here, I’ve brought you a nice bowl of ketchup and a spoon.  Eat up.”  No, it’s the thought (it usually is the unbidden thought that is the greatest temptation) that overcomes us, hijacks our minds, hearts, souls and strength.  The devil’s wiles are never what we expect.  Our weaknesses are well known to the deceiver.  For those who struggle with alcohol, he doesn’t bring a glass of chocolate milk.  For those who have a drug addiction, it is not aspirin that sits on the dining room table.  Pornography?  I would guess the devil doesn’t show up with a J. Crew magazine.

Part of Jesus training and testing is to know the utmost limits that his humanness will stretch before breaking.  Yes, he was hungry.  Bread would be great.  But that was the easiest of the tests.  If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here.  Just check.  Just be sure that God is watching over you.  He lets a lot of people down.  Cancer? Hurricane?  Divorce?  Abuse?   Ever heard of those?  You’d better make sure that he’s got your back before you sail this course, because I’m going to cruuuuushhhh you slowly and surely. 

Isn’t there a part of all of us that wishes, no, needs, to know two things about God:  that he is real and that he cares?  Don’t we test God all the time?  Just one more drink.  If God really wants me to be sober, he’ll do something to let me know.  Or, this is the last time, one last hit and then I’m done, I mean it.  That’s what God really wants and if I quit (after this time) then I know that he is real.  One last time on this website.  I’ll know I feel guilty when I look at this, but if it were really wrong, wouldn’t the computer crash when I turn it on?  That will be my sign.  And, if God doesn’t cause anything bad to happen… well, it must not be that wrong. 

Jesus, like any human, had to have struggled with this, right? 

Then, to the top of the mountain.  At the end of forty days, perhaps mind and body beginning to play tricks on him, perhaps weakening in resolve, the devil sends the last salvo, the one that all humans fall for.  You can have everything.  I control this and I can give it to whomever I choose.  Why not you, Jesus?  Why not enjoy this amazing gift of life that he’s given you in a villa by the ocean, servants everywhere at your disposal - everything that gives pleasure (even if momentary, but don’t think about that).  It’s just one moment of hesitation.  That’s all it would take and I’ll remove every physical obstacle from you.  No cross, no pain, no abandonment by friends – all that you have to do is fall on your knees and confess that God is good, but not quite good enough. 

How easy would it have been?  God is a God of forgiveness.  Surely he would forgive his own son for a moment of weakness.  They could just start over, maybe in another generation.  Maybe when the world was a little easier.  Maybe when there would be mobile phones and completely different, and less painful understanding of sacrifice.

The cliff notes version of Jesus’ encounter with the devil is in Mark; Matthew and Luke are much more patient, but today’s Christian would appreciate Mark’s version: Test taken, test passed – let’s get on to the good stuff.

But we 21^st century Christians are so incredibly impatient and so completely allergic to being in want that we skip over these two verses.  This is the beginning of Jesus’ transition – to need food, to need assurance and to need safety – we can’t skip over it. 

What is the symbolic desert that the contemporary human must be led into?  What are we lacking that must be tested?  What is our hunger?  What is behind our need for assurance?  What about our addiction to feeling safe?

From Fear to Faith

Moving from one place to another is much more about emotion than about packing up the things of life that hold a spot in the house.  The emotional aspect of transition is much more difficult to unpack.  After the call, then there is a process by which each person must accept the move.  In many ways, it’s like the process of dying.  Elizabeth Kubler-Ross promotes these five stages of dying which I think are the same five stages of transitional moving: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.  No one goes through these stages at the same pace; sometimes we even go back and forth between them.  But after what I perceived to be the call to the Australian Lutheran Church, I found that the transition was very much like a dying process for me.  In order for new life to occur, something old had to die.

And it was a part of me that I really wanted to keep alive.

After months of agonizing over the decision, of trying to keep it secret from the congregation that I was serving, and after hiding it from even my own consciousness, I began to get angry with my wife, my kids, the congregation, God, it didn’t matter.  The United States was where I had grown up and I needed the comfort of the American accent and the (mostly) accepted understanding that God is real and relatively well liked.  My anger at my wife was nothing that she did, but simply the uncontrollable fact that she was Australian.  It’s not like I just woke up one morning after twelve years of marriage and said to myself, “Jeez, I just realized that my wife doesn’t have the same accent as I do and maybe she would like to live near her home for a while.”  When we are asked to step away from ourselves, our first instinct, unfortunately, is to strike out at those closest to us rather than to face head-on our instinctive difficulty to trust.

I knew that it was coming and yet I resented her background because it made me dis-comfortable at that time.  For nights, she would be unable to fall asleep, eyes searching the dark ceiling until 2:12 a.m. wondering if we had made the right choice.  Then, she would succumb to sleep praying for her husband.  At 2:13 I would wake up, startled from sleep by the rampaging thoughts that we were making a mistake.  And, if we were making a mistake, certainly it was Christine’s fault because there was no way we’d be moving to Plainland if she wasn’t Australian.

At least that’s what I thought.

But I was mad at God, too.  I liked being comfortable.  When we find ourselves in dis-comfort, life becomes a black hole of self-pity and all of our energy is used trying to figure out how to escape the malaise of the inevitability of change.  I spent an inordinate amount of time saying stupid things to God like…

All right, I’ll do this for you, but you better make life even more comfortable for me when we get to Plainland. 

Or

All right, God, I’ll be the martyr, I’ll pick up the cross for my wife and move all the way to the other side of the planet, but you better change my wife so that she constantly praises me for the awesomeness that I embody for her, because I did this for her (never mind the fact that she had uprooted fifteen years before to live in my country) and you’d better send some people to the church that really appreciate me as the awesome pastor that I am and have them feel like they need to stroke my ego by telling me so.  That’s what you’d better do if I do this.

And then, God ignores my complaints, ignores my ignorance of the bigger picture, ignores my foolishness and simply says, “Go in whatever strength that you have and I will be with you.”  “In your weakness, I am made strong; we’ll do this together.”

I was weak.. 

It’s not like I recognized God’s words to be uplifting or even harbingers of joy.  It’s not as if understanding brings about happiness.  When we hear God’s call, that’s when transition begins.  My emotional detachment was moving past anger, past the stupidity of bargaining with God and into the stress of depression.  I sank deeper and deeper into myself the more photos I saw packaged and placed into large cardboard boxes.  I knew that I wouldn’t see them for four months (that’s how long it takes to transport belongings across the Pacific), but I wasn’t prepared not to see them for fourteen months (that’s how long it took us to unpack all the boxes).  I didn’t get to see the visible representations of who I was, where I’d been and what comfortable life was like (at least my fallible recollection of it).

When we finally did open the remaining boxes of our belongings, the ones with the photos in them, the amount of time to hammer nails into the walls took quite a bit longer than it should have.  It wasn’t the hardship of actually finding a stud in a wall, which never happens for me.  I usually end up frustrated by the fact that I’ve made the wall look like a Lite Brite[1]. 

With each photo that we lovingly placed on the wall or on top of a cabinet, a flood of memories washes over us and we were reminded of where we came from and what life was like.  Spending time remembering is one of the most important parts of transition.  In our contemporary Western culture, we are constantly in a rush to get to new information, fast information – forget about the actual details of the story, just let me know what I need to know in order to operate.

But the ancients didn’t have that fascination with speed.  Half of the importance of telling a story was setting the scene – remembering what that time was like, who the people were, how they behaved under pressure.  The snapshots from the Bible give us a collection of pictures of how God interacted with his people.  And with each portrait, we are given a new understanding of how God changed it all in the person of Jesus.  In studying the Bible, we begin to recognize not how much is lost in translation (although that happens) but how much is lost in transition.  What we notice in the book of Mark, where I’ll focus, is the way Jesus shapes the world view of the Jews, the gentiles, the disciples and future believers.  The greatest transition of all.

From fear to faith.

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[1] A Lite Brite is basically a plastic box with a Christmas light in the back.  Covering the front is a hard plastic mesh where a template with a picture is placed.  After pushing colored plastic pieces through the template and the through the holes of the mesh, the light is turned on to reveal the picture in glowing form.  I got one for Christmasoncet.

Signs

When we moved to Australia from the United States, there was a large cloud of trepidation surrounding us.  It goes without saying that it was a big move, but this move was much more than a physical move – much more than just shifting our belongings from one garage to the next.

Movement is just one more part of life that we’ve grown used to.  It’s like our favorite song on the radio: we know when it starts; we know the progression of the lyrics; we know when the bridge is coming and then, of course, the final chorus.  Most of us can feel when it is time to pack up and start the next adventure.  It feels like a little fish nibbling on the edges of our souls, that the moment of transition is about to begin again and, with something akin to excited resignation,; the cardboard boxes are brought in, the wrapping tape begins to scream around the house, riiiiiiiip, the crinkling of newspapers around breakables bounces between walls and we stand wondering…

How is this ever going to work?  Were we crazy to even think about this?

            September of 2009, I asked God for clarity.  That’s my particularly pious way of saying that I asked God to be very obvious in letting me know whether a move to Australia at that moment in time was beneficial for his plan.  And when I say I wanted God to be very obvious, I mean that I wanted God to drop an atlas from the sky, a map of Australia if possible, with the page opened to the Lockyer Valley that would have a smudge of something across Plainland, Queensland.

It’s biblical, kind of.

Gideon was doing what his dad asked, no questions asked, threshing wheat and  probably daydreaming about what his friends were doing, maybe what was going to happen at the dance that weekend.  Just another workday in a long list of workdays.  His father, Joash asked him to thresh the wheat in the winepress to hide it from the Midianites, who were the local personification of power in the area.

Then, this stranger comes and sits down under the tree and greets young Gideon.  “The LORD is with you mighty warrior.”

If I have come to know anything about the biblical narrative, two things carry great significance: location and labeling.  Especially in the Old Testament, location is always particularly important because the land is important, the placement of people says something about them.  If Egypt is mentioned, we think of oppressions, slavery and intolerance; wilderness – trials, tribulations, law; Jerusalem – holy place, God’s name resides there… you get the pictures.  Whenever angels arrive on the scene, it has been important for me to recognize exactly where that is.  The heavenly messengers often show up around trees, away from the busyness of life, somewhere in the wild parts of life.  Whether Abraham and the three angels who tell him how life will transition to fatherhood or Moses and his own superheated shrubbery, location near trees is important.  Whenever a tree is mentioned in the Bible, my spiritual ears perk up and I listen to what I know will be an important change.  An uprooting, usually from one place of comfort to a place of total dis-comfort.

Under this tree Gideon hears from the man (he doesn’t know it’s an angel at this point: in fact, the author ceases to call the man and angel, but the LORD himself – but we’ll stick to ‘man’) and greets him with distrust. 

“If (my emphasis) the LORD is with us, then why has all this happened?” Gideon asks.  If I were the LORD in this situation, I would have already disqualified Gideon for duty.  It’s apparent that he lacks the correct depth of faith to be called to do something.  “If?”  Are you joking?  The Lord should just move on to one of Gideon’s older brothers.  Please. 

           But Gideon’s question is one that we all bring forth from the deepest places of our hearts.  Gideon actually has the courage to verbalize it, to speak it out loud.  His courage is evident even in doubting that God’s strength is defeated by theodicy (how God could be all powerful and let bad things happen).  Gideon’s worldview is one of disappointment in a God powerful enough to bring the Israelites out of Egypt but, in his perception, not caring enough to deliver them from the current crisis of the Midianites. Think – What have you done for me lately?  Those words, ‘If the LORD is with us…” speak loudly to this generation.  “If the LORD is with us, if the LORD is Immanuel, then why did my parents die in a car accident on the way to churcht?  If the LORD is with us, why are children being abused, physically, verbally, emotionally by adults who have no concept of the treasure that resides within each young person?  If the LORD is with us, why is their disease, famine, tsunamis, mosquitos… you name it.  Our anger is against the presumption of an omnipotent God who withholds his power for an unknown human reason.

But Gideon is talking to the LORD.  The angel does not even bother with the question because it is a moot point.  There is no ‘if the LORD is with us’ because, literally, the LORD is sitting right in front of Gideon, underneath the tree, calling him to transition from that place of comfort, a place where he and the whole clan has accepted to second best – to be present day slaves in Midian, not Egypt.

Notice the words in Judges 6, “The LORD turned to him…”  The man/angel/LORD must have been staring into the distance as Gideon was questioning him, waiting until all the vitriol that had been boiling up under the surface, that questioning attitude of the whole community of Israel, broke like a blister.  Then, the LORD turned to him, his full attention placed upon that one person who would be a chosen one. 

“Go.”

Man, I hate that word sometimes.  Go.  Move.  Don’t stay where you are doing what you’ve always done.  Go, mighty warrior.  That’s not who you are right now, but if I call you that, it is what I see within you.  You have the qualities of the person that I want.  Even though you see yourself as the least worthy, that’s what I want.  Because when you are not full of yourself, you can be full of me, and when you are full of me, you are my strength.  It doesn’t matter if you are the youngest son in the weakest clan in the poorest part of Israel. 

            I call you. 

Now, get going.

The LORD had already noticed the strength of Gideon’s hands and the might of his heart.  His call is to actually do something now – not just complain about the current situation, but to do something about it.  How often are we caught in that place, that location, like the tree, its roots pushed down so far into the soil that there is no thought of relocation even if the stream has dried up long ago. We know that something has to be done in order for joy to be restored.  And even though we know that something has to be done we find all sorts of excuses not to be the one to do something about it.  Someone else is better qualified.  I’m too old.  I’m too young.  I don’t have enough faith.  The problem is too big to be solved.  We’ve never done it this way before. 

For many Christians, complaining is a way of life, a methodology that they’ve learned from previous entitled generations.  If we don’t like the way something is being done church, we’ll make our complaints heard, stir up trouble, then move to another church and start the process all over again.  This is the contemporary Christian way of shunning commitment.  If a church, a group or a family requires movement in another direction, it’s very easy for the 21st century human to just move physically, rather than remain emotionally to change the circumstances where they are.  Imagine if Gideon had said to the LORD, ‘You know what, you’re right, I will go – not to what you’ve called me to, but to some other greener pastures.  That will be a lot easier.’

But the LORD cared not for Gideon’s complaints.  “I will be with you, and you will strike down the Midianites.”  The promise.  I am Immanuel.  With you.  Together we will do this; we will erase this thing that is causing your slavery.  Together.

So Gideon asks for signs – three times.  Just because he is not quite sure, not quite convinced that the LORD would ask someone like him, someone with no qualifications in the eyes of most people, he asks time and time and time again.  From the fear of the first sign, the man touched the food that Gideon brought to him and set it on fire, to the gradual acceptance that God, indeed, was calling him to change from wheat-thresher to warrior-extraordinaire. 

I wanted only one of those signs.  But I wanted to pick the sign.  I wanted to tell God how he should communicate the message to me.  It was 2009 and I wanted God to speak to me, especially in a time of great turmoil, in the language of Gideon’s time.  I wanted fire coming from rock; I wanted dew and fleece; I wanted miracles.

But God doesn’t move that way as much anymore.  The calling of individuals isn’t done through the miraculous because we are now a generation resigned to skepticism.  We can rationalize anything that smacks of the incredulous.  God doesn’t speak through burning bushes or pillars of fire.  He’s become more subtle.  When we ask for a sign, it’s not usually a stop sign, but more like a street sign.  We only notice it if we are looking for it.

On the way to a funeral, Christine called me to say that her dad had e-mailed.  Not twenty minutes after I had prayed for a sign, the e-mail said that the president of the Lutheran Church of Australia had talked with Robert (my father-in-law) about perhaps moving to Australia to be a pastor. 

Can I have another sign please? 

 

Chap. 1 part deux - The Ball Player

I used to enjoy playing softball.  I enjoyed it immensely, actually; the seeming lack of athleticism required to play slow pitch softball makes it available for all ages.

Once, after watching the pitcher lift the hardball ten feet in the air which then arced down over the plate, I crushed the ball to centerfield.  Because it was a rarity for me to actually get on base, I lumbered down the first base line as fast as I could.  Thinking that I could turn this seeing-eye single into a double, I attempted to round first base. 

If I was a commentator, I would struggle to describe how anyone, in the vigorous sport of slow-pitch softball, could actually trip over the square white bag and literally slide from first base across an acre of gravel, into the outfield.  I did not receive a graceful award and as the centerfielder threw the ball to the first basemen to tag me out, he did so with forced neutrality. 

“You’d better get that looked at,” he said pointing down to my leg with the ball in the glove.

“Doesn’t hurt,” I said, but, in reality, it felt like someone had just shaved my leg with a chain saw.  I made the mistake of looking at it.  There were pieces of gravel sticking up at various intervals from my shin.

“Whatever,” the first basemen said as he threw the ball back to the ‘athlete’ that some would call the ‘pitcher.’ 

That night as I staggered into home hoping that Christine would take great pity on me, I walked past her grunting a little bit.  As she was on the computer, she didn’t pay attention to me at first.  Not wanting to be a baby about it, but realistically wanting to be treated like a baby, I stood near her, looking over her shoulder, not really caring what she was typing, but hoping that she’d notice me in my pitiful condition. 

She didn’t.  So, I moved in closer, lightly touched my leg to the desk and audibly winced.  You know, when you scrunch up your eyes, suck the air through your teeth, make a little moaning noise in the back of the throat like a cat that’s about ready to toss a furball – that’s what I did.  Finally, she noticed my immense misery.

“I knew you’d do that.  You just can’t play sports without hurting yourself.  You’re getting too old for this tomfoolery.”  It was not the response I was expecting.  I wanted that woman who, when we were first married, actually went to the softball games to cheer her hero on; I wanted that woman who, when her hero was hurt, looked horrified that her Prince Charming was in pain, and, frankly, she was shocked that her superhero could actually bleed.  I wanted that woman, who, when we were first married, encased me in her arms to make me feel better.

Not that woman whose first words were, “I told you so.”.

I backed away from her.  She took one last look at the computer screen, saved her work, shut down the computer, yawned loudly into her hand, walked into the kitchen, turned on the kettle, switched off the light and then said, “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”

Dang.  I knew what that meant and I shouldn’t have brought to her attention that I had been wounded in the true coliseum of middle aged athleticism.  I knew what was coming; she took one look at my leg and thought,

Yes, that’s going to seep all over our sheets tonight.

Into the bathroom she led me where she began to draw a bath.  She rolled up my pant leg to take a look at the wound.  Let’s just say she wasn’t gentle.

“Ouch,” I complained. 

“Don’t be such a baby.  Get into the bath.”  I stripped down the rest of the way making sure the rest of my clothes made no contact with the wound. 

Putting my good leg into the hot water, I gave a real wince this time.  “Does it have to be this hot?”

“Just sit down,” she said while organizing her tools.  Like a surgeon’s assistant, she had placed a towel on the floor beside her lined with the instruments of my torture.  Washcloth. Abrasive pad.  Tweezers. Antibiotic cream.  Wrap.

“Can’t we just soak it in the water a little bit?  Won’t the gravel naturally just loosen and float to the bottom of the tub?”

She gave me one of those looks that said, please- get real.  You know, the one where she tilts her head to the side, scrunches up that little place between her eyes, fake little smile playing across her face as if to say ‘I can think of a thousand other things that I’d rather be doing than playing nurse to my past-his-athletic-prime husband.’

Just as she was about to start scrubbing, I said the worst thing possible.

“You don’t want to get your clothes wet.  Don’t you think you should get in too?”

Christine wet the washcloth and threw it on my roadrashed leg.  Pain shot through me like I’d received an electric shock.  “You can do this yourself.”  So, my wife of multiple years, who had transitioned to adulthood many years before, walked out on me, her husband, who had yet to fully embrace maturity.

Sitting in the hot tub of water, staring down at the menagerie of medicinal tools, I decided to just let the water take hold.  Surely, the gravel would be ejected naturally by God’s own universal solvent.

It hurt too much to rub the cloth over it fully, so I picked out the biggest pieces of dirt, ran moving water over the rest and called it good.  I could hear Christine in the other room typing furiously away, probably editing her Facebook page to read, “Infantile husband cleaning up his leg after losing a skirmish with his age.” 

Lots of thumbs up for that one, I would guess.

 After air drying as best I could, I left the tweezers where they lay.  There was too much pus oozing from the eight inch scrape on the right side of my calf so I couldn’t see the gravel anyway.  Leaving all the other tools that Christine would have used, I went straight for the bandage.  I just needed to get that thing wrapped. 

I don’t know why I have a fascination with bandages.  They’re stretchy and so much fun to roll up.  I was actually looking forward to wrapping my leg.  Placing one end directly in the middle of the wound, I held it lightly with my left hand while pulling it tight with the right.  Then, circling the leg almost a dozen times up and down my calf, I tucked the trailing end into the bottom on the back side of my leg (I would have used the little sharp, clippy things but I’d lost them in a previous accident.)

The handiwork was well done.  The compression on the road rash felt much better and I almost whistled as I prepared for bed.

“Did you use the lubricating ointment?” Christine queried from the other room.  “If you don’t use that, the bandage is going to stick.”

“Yup,” I said.  My own body’s lubricating ointment of pus would work just fine.  What did she know anyway?

It was uncomfortable that night, but eventually sleep found me.  The next morning, I pulled back the covers and noticed that my wound had indeed seeped all the way through twelve layers of bandage and left some beautiful smudges on the sheets and quilt.  Quickly I pulled the covers back over the bed hoping that Christine would not notice the necessity for washing sheets, but, that would definitely be an alternate universe when Christine does not notice something.

I padded across the wooden floor down the hallway to the bathroom where I turned on the light.  I sat down on the toilet and began to unwrap.  What had been done ten hours earlier in relative ease became forty-five minutes of agony.  Each layer of wrap had stuck to the next and as I pulled one back after another, I literally had to bite back the scream.  Then, the last layer, almost there.  But then I remember I had put the end piece right in the middle of the wound. 

Idiot.

I looked around for a wooden stick to put between my teeth, like they do in the movies, but all that I could find was the discarded cardboard center from a toilet paper roll.  Couldn’t be choosy.  I bit down on the cardboard feeling my teeth make imprints preparing for the worst.

With a quick motion (like you are supposed to do with bandages, right?) I ripped back the final layer and with great agony I bounced around the bathroom, hopping around like a fox post-trap, mouthing the words that I desperately wanted to shout out loud.  They rang inside my head – a gong – nothing can describe pain like that. 

And then I saw Christine standing at the door, arms crossed, hair recently mussed by her pillow.  “You didn’t put on the lubricating cream, did you?”

See, that’s what it’s like to move to fifteen different houses in fifteen years and keep packing and unpacking, garage sailing and garage selling, hawking treasures that you haven’t used for years but each one of them has a memory so indelibly attached that the pain of actually seeing it walk away is greater than the pain of packing it one more time.  But when we do cull the things that we have, it is like peeling back a bandage quickly.  The moments must be lubricated by reflection and good old fashioned mourning. 

But it’s still painful. 

Especially when you have to move from comfortable to dis-comfortable.  I don’t say ‘uncomfortable’ because that carries with it this idea of the Princess and the Pea, that something small has caused a rough night of sleep.  That’s ‘uncomfortable.’  On the other hand ‘dis-comfortable,’ is not just about physical pain, but emotional, spiritual and psychological also. 

Transition causes dis-comfort because it requires we give something up, not just location, but perspective and ignorance.  This book is about life and its transitions and the things that get lost in the between.  Hopefully you will find yourself in the spaces between words as I have found balm for the memories of transition.