With Healing in His Wings

I was reminded this morning by a friend that the ministry of healing is a good ministry. I have another friend — that is now two, if you are counting — who recently injured herself. Her response to being injured is to try to be more active. Actually doctors have suggested that this should be a time of quiet and rest so healing can proceed quickly. Against such well-trained advice, she has decided that being up and busy is a better way forward. Now she guaranteed that she will be injured longer, will live wearier and will heal crooked. If only she had the grace to be still and heal.

When a church or other human system, a family or business has been hurt, it needs to heal. It needs to rest and recover. When it is able to function a little, it needs to take pointers from the physical therapists and try small steps in safe environments. We are in a time of recovery at UA church. We are resting a bit. We are also beginning to take steps forward into the future.

I think in my life I am always in some phase of recovery from some near disaster. Maybe we are all hurting, healing and hobbling in some way all the time. May God grant us the grace to get into fewer dangerous situations, the grace to realize when we are hurt, the wisdom to rest and rehab slowly and the courage to launch out again into a risky, delightful world. Churches, families, folks and I need to remember this.

May God bless us all

Preaching Wisdom

I went to Lipscomb University in Nashville last week to attend a sermon workshop on preaching wisdom. David Fleer and David Bland brought together great lights and moderately great lights to help us get a focus on the wisdom books, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and James, for preaching. 

Proverbs begins with the simple truth that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. Those presenting the material did remind us that this didn't mean we should be trapped in trembling, cowering fear before God. Neither did they think that mere "respect" was an adequate translation for the Hebrew in the text. 

Being in the presence of God ought to stir us to our very souls. To be with the One who knows us inside out and upside down ought to sober us. The idea that we could fritter away the opportunity to live in covenant promised relationship with God should send shivers down our spines. Never letting our present moments out of sight of our certain future judgment before the Lord should focus our present landscape as clear as crystal.

Living in the awesome presence of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom because there is no place to hide folly there. 

Eggs and Legos

In my refrigerator, I have a carton of eggs. They are grade A large. Each one looks exactly like the others. Each one has its own little egg place to fill. When I go to get an egg, it doesn't matter which one I get because they are all the same really. 

In my upstairs closet, I have a container of Legos. My grandson Sailor likes them. Legos come in different sizes and shapes and colors. They live all jumbled inside the box waiting to do their Lego thing when summoned. 

Some folks wish the church could be like a carton of eggs. Uniform. Separate. Predictable. I guess under certain duress folks could be compressed and suppressed into egg-like uniformity. Someone would probably smugly announce that everyone is alike because each one looks like Jesus. 

Of course the truth is that the church is much more like a box of Legos than a carton of eggs. Jesus calls a very random group of folks together to be his. He says this gathering of misfit toys looks like him. The Holy Spirit distributes a diverse array of gifts within the Body of Christ. Different cultures and generations come together. Different sexes and different upbringings come together. I cannot begin to list all the differences brought into unity in Christ. Yet, they do come together and all the pieces fit together to become the Temple of God, the Family of Heaven, the Body of Christ, the Church of the First Born Ones. And it is amazing.

A secret: I sometimes wish we were eggs. We would be easier to manage. 

An admission: I don't like being treated like an egg. 

A bad pun exhortation: Let's be happy that we are different and that God can use us all. 

Ready? OK. 

Let's Lego and let God.

God bless us all. 

A Prayer

O God,

Put to death what is evil in us so that we might be more filled with your Spirit. Change our hearts that we might bear the Spirit's fruit. Help us love the church, the Body of Christ for whose sake the Spirit has given us His gifts. Open our mouths with the good news of life as the Spirit bears witness to Jesus through us. Use our hands and feet to do your will in caring for others.

To the glory of the Father, within the fellowship of the Spirit, in the name of Jesus. Amen.

This simple prayer calls for our best cooperation with the work of God in us and in the world. We have been invited in the love of the Father, the blood of Jesus and the open hand of the Spirit to join in the great work of bringing life to this world. Paul likens the invitation to an offer of adoption into the family of the Holy Trinity. We are adopted children invited to join the family business.

At our best we inadequately represent the character and interests of the Family. Our hearts are not as loving as the Father’s heart. Our will is not as obedient as the will of Son. Our desire for joyful connections with others is not nearly that of the Spirit. Still we are invited to open our churches, homes and hearts in response to the invitation to be God’s Family incarnate in the world.

Stunning.

In response to this invitation, we put to death what is evil in us, change our hearts to receive and respond to the Spirit, and open our mouths and our hands with good news. Here in the heart of Austin, God calls us. 

God bless us all. 

 

Pneumatic Tools

I have a friend. I am not a very good friend to him, I fear, but he is a great friend. He likes tools and gadgets. He would help me do anything. The thing I loved about his garage was that he had plumbed it to carry compressed air to a number of different spots in his garage/workshop. Once he turned on his big time compressor, he had multiple places to attach his pneumatic wrenches and other air-driven devices. I was impressed that a ordinary guy could have the same tools as my higher-priced compadres at the Firestone store. 

After last Sunday's visit with the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, one of his best days, I have decided that the church is meant to be a pneumatic tool and each Christian is meant to be a pneumatic tool. The Greek word for spirit and for wind is the same word—PNEUMA. It is the word that gives us scary words like PNEUMONIA and tool words like PNEUMATIC. A pneumatic wrench operates on compressed air. A Christian does not work unless filled with the Pneuma of God, the Holy Spirit. So... I don't think I am charismatic by the common definition; I do think I want to be seriously pneumatic. We all could be. We all could be pneumatic tools in the hands of God.

May God bless us all.

You Will Always Have The Poor with You…

One of the transitions for me over the past year is dealing with constant presence of the poor. In Abilene people were poor. Annette worked in an elementary school that provided free breakfast and lunch for 95% of its students. A small group of homeless men and women lived in a camp near a railroad bridge. Ministries of various churches focused on the poor, the working poor, the homeless poor, the aged poor, the mentally challenged poor, even the poor from other countries who were settled there. So we did have working knowledge of the poor and ministry to the poor in Abilene.

But...Austin. In Austin the poor are much more among us and in ways that I have not yet learned to deal with. The men and women asking for money at the intersections raise questions in my mind about doing the temporary good versus doing the best thing for them over all. Is it really good to make intersection begging a viable career choice? What circumstances would put me in their shoes? WWJD? I feel confused and vulnerable in their presence.

The people standing in the crowds of day laborers waiting for work make me wish I needed something built or hauled or painted. Every time I ride the bus I find at least one man or woman who is using the bus for self-directed adult daycare. My wife Annette is working at an elementary school where 98% of the students qualify for free meals. Add to this list of the persistent categories of the poor, those whose good jobs have ended and who have been forced to live through their savings toward a day where the impoverished life begins. Always. The poor are with us always.

The rest of that story is that God loves the poor. God loves those who love the poor. The poor in spirit and the poor in stuff are high on his list. We are invited to have a heart for the poor. We are not expected to eliminate the problem of the poor. The poor are always present. We are expected to have a constant ministry of compassionate sharing with the poor. The poor inside the fellowship of the Body of Christ get to stand at the front of the line. The poor, in all the ways they present themselves, are never outside the ministry heart of Jesus or his church.

So a part of the Christian experience is to be troubled by the troubles of the poor; to be moved by the pain and need of the poor; to act in selfless and compassionate ways for the poor; to serve the poor as we would serve Jesus if he were poor, to serve the poor as if Jesus were in our skins making the choices about how to serve the poor. And we will never get through. The fallen nature of our world guarantees a few things and one of them is "you will always have the poor with you."

God bless us all.

On the Brink

The recent series "Living on the Brink" from 2 Timothy received responses that were sobering. Person after person thought it was time we stopped whistling through the graveyard and say out loud that things in this world are crazy weird dangerous right now. 

Many of us have had some sweet years with things going along pretty well. We know what our faith was like during those times. We got to dabble with this or that idea or imagine a ministry initiative of one kind or another. The thought process was calm. The stakes were manageable. This thinking at the shallow end of the pool was comfortable. And nothing much had to be done in the near future. No crisis loomed. 

To be sure we have all had various crises in our personal lives and families. Still all those difficulties took place against a backdrop of relative comfort and ease for most of us in middle-class in America. Now the world of worry and want that the poor have long known has become a world that threatens to dominate. A sane and sober man has looked into my eyes within the last 24 hours and said, "I think that we may see levels of need and people in situations within the next two or three years that we never thought we would see here." 

Hmmm. What to do? What if the life that folks on the margins of life have always known becomes more the norm? What if more and more of us take our place living on the margins of life where money, work, time and comfort are scarce? What becomes of our life and faith then?

What we found in 2 Timothy is still a good place to start when framing a faithful answer to how to live on the brink. 

The first thing we do is recover our weak flame of gift and calling and claim the power of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, standing unashamed in this world with all of its challenge and trouble. 

The second thing we do is focus with greater clarity on the word of God — the God-breathed word that is unchained, powerful and life-shaping in all situations. 

The third thing we do is lift our eyes from the immediate and urgent and lock our vision on the promises of God that stand today and stretch out into a richly satisfying and rewarding eternity. 

This life may indeed become more uncertain. We may see the sand on which many, and perhaps even we ourselves, have built their lives for what it is. This wild, raging sea of a world is the right place to stand on the ever moving wave of the present as it absorbs the future and leaves the past. We are on the edge, the brink, the wave. Let the metaphors roll and tumble to describe where we are, but … really this is where followers of Christ have always stood and demonstrated their faith to the world. 

Don't be afraid.

God bless us all.

Standing on Holy Ground

This summer I got to perform a wedding for dear friends in Rome, Italy. The couple was beautiful. The setting at San Saba church and at the reception on the old Appian way made the wedding unforgettable. The cab ride back to the city also etched itself into my memory. 

As a part of being in Rome, Annette and I walked through the Colosseum and the palace grounds of the Roman emperors. While the buildings were magnificent, I kept hearing the voices of the Christians who had lived and died in those places. Tacitus says Nero lit his gardens with the burning bodies of Christians. He entertained his guests by having Christians sewn into the skins of animals and letting the dogs tear and devour them. The Colosseum floor often ran red with the blood of multitudes of Christian men and women. 

Those ancient, faithful ones would not renounce their faith in the face of sure and tortured death. They affirmed the reality of their faith rather than succumb to their fear in the critical moments of their trials. In Colosseum a cross stands victorious in the ruins. The empire is gone. The Colosseum is in ruins. The cross and resurrection still stand. Those who died, live. 

It was good to stand on that holy ground. I could hear their voices. I could hear another voice, my own, asking, "Eddie, what would you have done?"

Wilderness Wonderings

Ruth Haley Barton uses the story of Elijah's successes and fears as the subtext for her Invitation to Solitude and Silence. She points out the uncomfortable truth that after every success may come fear and doubt. She assures that before any great encounter with Holy God comes a wilderness to cross. God often offers rest and restoration after a trial only so we will have the strength for the journey across the vast desert to that sweet place of communion in the hollow of Mt. Horeb.

So why do we panic at the prospect of the wildernesses of our lives and of our churches? It is plain. Nothing is attractive about the waterless places in our life where God seems remote; temptation is strong; the flesh is weak; the evil one breathes his hot breath on our necks; our vision is clouded; our memory of former intimacy with God grows dim. Nothing is attractive about the wilderness except... it is the path to a greater intimacy with God; a greater strength of the Spirit in our lives; a more crushing defeat for the evil one; a clearer view of the past, present and future of our lives in God. 

I know the wilderness—lately. I serve a church that knows the wilderness—lately. While the temptation to despair and self-pity besets us each day, the thought of what lies at the end of the journey thrills me and, I hope, all of us. So let's fall in love a bit with sun and sand and sky and journey on until nothing is more real than God in our presence and we in His.

Purely Personal

This week my grandson Sailor turned three. I want to share with you the piece I wrote on the day he was born. He came a bit early. I was not there. I was an assistant leader on a trip to Israel. At the very time he was born in Austin, I was in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. When I got back to the hotel, I found out that he had been born and at the time I was in the church— about the time I took the photo above.  So I wrote this piece:

An April day and far away I hear of you

Born on the day that I stand in Bethlehem

All around the icons of Mary and her baby

Watch me, smiling at what they know...

That your mother has strained in the morning

And brought you to light.

I feel so far away from you and my heart would break

If I did not know that the One who caused the sun to rise in Bethlehem

Caused the son of my son to rise in Austin

So in my heart -- peace, as I wait to hold you.

'Til then, I pray 

Bless God the Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth

For the great gift of life in Sailor Durham Sharp

Now may you be blessed with faith, love and hope all your life

And may you be an instrument of justice in the hand of God.

Amen.

It was a good day. Happy Birthday, Sail!

Breathing In and Out in the Kingdom of God

Jesus told his followers that he was doing the work of his Father. He came into the world with something to do. He was on a mission. Jesus had his identity. He had his relationship with the Father and the Spirit. Jesus was completely stocked with all the desired inner life elements. The inward disciplines of retreat and prayer were a part of maintaining his life.  All of the innerness prepared him for his outward life -- the life of giving, listening, serving, healing, teaching, hurting, crying, suffering, dying. His inner life undergirded his outer life -- his work.

While one could argue that a life of inner devotion might be a work offered to God, that is not a complete offering by any means. We are meant to get on with doing the work of the Kingdom of God. The inner life and outer life are two sides of our Christian respiration. We have heard it forever. We cannot just breath in and in and in. We cannot always exhale. The rhythm of life and the rhythm of Christian life are the same: breath in and breath out.

What I have learned about all this from myself is that my fleshly self doesn't want to breath in or out in the Kingdom of God. My flesh does not want the holy desire of my spirit or the presence of the Holy Spirit. Like an obstructing airway, my dark heart does not want early mornings with the Lord or late night devotion. My flesh wants to reserve my inner world for fears and imaginings unspeakable. My flesh does not want me to take time and energy for acts of faith. My flesh makes out my Daytimer without room for caring for others. My flesh is always trying to book me for stardom and attention. My flesh cares nothing for crosses — not that of Christ, not one for me. My flesh has one hand around my throat crushing my airway; the other hand tries to trip me every step I take toward loving action.

So today I have to commit out of my heart and mind to want what my flesh cannot stand. I have to commit to want the life God can give in Christ. Against the backdrop of the disaster my flesh desires for me, I can see a different life. I can see life in the presence of God's sweet Holy Spirit. I can see the Cross of Christ as the expression of God's love for the world and for me in that world. I can open myself to holy CPR as God breathes his Spirit into me. I can open myself as the example of the ministry of Jesus calls my Spirit-given gifts into meaningful action. I can see that life. 

I pray that my spirit's hopes will overcome the desire of the flesh. When I died to the flesh in Christ and was raised with the Holy Spirit, this impossible life became possible. Today I must urge my spirit to continue to want in me what the Holy Spirit wants in me: breathing in and out in the Kingdom of God. We can do this. By God's grace,we can do this.

God help us all.

Palm Sunday Coming

This Sunday is Palm Sunday. 

I didn't grow up knowing about Palm Sunday. We didn't think holy thoughts about holy days. We were every-Sunday-is-holy folks with a conceit that such a regular focus made us better than the folks who were spiritual on an annual calendar. But now. I guess because I am aging, Sundays come twice a week, and the annual holidays seem to be pretty frequent. So, I am thinking about Palm Sunday. 

Jesus was kind and sweet to the people of simple hopes and nascent faith. They had little, if any, idea what Jesus was going to be about, but they showed up and showered the road with greenery and Jesus with praise. What did Jesus think of all that noise? He could have been cynical, knowing how the week was going to unfold into betrayal, inquisition, torture and crucifixion. He might have been happy knowing that the joys of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem would pale in comparison to the following Sunday's triumphant re-entry to life from the tomb.

I think it is wonderful that Jesus was willing to play the part of the earthly king coming to accept his kingdom. I think it is wonderful that he is as willing now to walk into my own conflicted heart as he was then to enter Jerusalem's contradictory scene of faith and doubt, anger and joy. I want to stand on tip-toe in my own life and watch him enter my life to accept shame for me, die for me and live for me. May each of my days, and I pray yours to, be a Palm Sunday day.

I am thrilled that Jesus enters our gathered worship, invited and praised, willing to be honored by the imperfect, but eager voices of his people. May he always enter. May every Sunday be a Palm Sunday for us in our churches.

"Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!"

It is not good for man to be alone...

Since I had the time and focus to blog last, I preached a three sermon series on men and women in the public worship assembly. I tried to show from the text that the core teaching was that from the beginning the image of God was projected best into the world when men and women together were fulfilling the responsibility to fill and manage the earth. In the same way, the image of God is presented well as men and women do the work of the Kingdom of God in the world together. 

The overture of the ministry of the church plays at Pentecost and the lyric is from Joel. The word of the Lord comes heralding the day when the sons and daughters of God will prophesy as the Holy Spirit rains down. That day has come in Acts 2. How the church that began under such words would become one in which the women would be excluded from having a voice in the family meetings around the family table is mystifying. The Corinthians were told that the men and the women could pray and prophesy as long as the men looked like men and the women looked like women. To be sure the disruptive wives were to be silent and ask their poor husbands at home. And it is not without cause that Paul tells Timothy to urge a quieter and more serene demeanor from the overbearing women teaching in Ephesus. 

Still I hear with louder, clearer tones the words of Paul to the Galatians, who are plummeting back into legalism, that now because of Christ the Jew-Gentile distinction is done; the slave-free distinction is done; the male-female distinction is done. I am thankful that God has worked to restore the wonder of his image in the life of the church as men and women work together without power and authority other than the power of love and the authority of the giftedness distributed by the Holy Spirit. This is not a matter of caving in to the demands of contemporary culture; it is the matter of restoring an ancient, honorable culture of man and woman together before the fall in the fellowship of the Father in the quiet of a garden.

Male and Female, He Created Them

So here I am minding my own business in Austin, Texas, when it becomes apparent that I need to preach a series of sermons about women in the Body of Christ and their public roles in worship. The congregation here has a long-standing commitment to expand the participation of women in the public worship. The problem is that the good teaching that was done here was done in 2005. The teacher is gone. The preacher at that time is gone. A different eldership is in place. So I need to put my own teaching out there for the church to consider. This eldership continues the commitment to change, but I need to outline the biblical teaching that under girds the direction we are heading.

Some folks believe that everything is settled on this matter just by checking a few proof-text verses and going on. I believe that before any verses are examined very closely it is good to know what the overarching teaching or theology is in which any verses about women in this case might be read. All the individual, exclusionary teachings must be set against the backdrop of what God has been doing from the time his image was expressed in the complementary unity of man and woman, against the backdrop of the thundering, Pentecost fulfillment of the prophecy of Joel and against Paul's teaching about the walls of separation that fall when the Jew, the Greek, the slave, the free, and the male and female come to Christ and are joined to him in baptism.

The issue of women's roles in the church is not just a women's issue. The truth is that men cannot know their roles until the roles of the women in the church are right and proper. No distorted role exists alone. The life of the oppressed slave isn't as it should be; neither is the life of the oppressing master as it should be. The abused child lives in a cruel, false world. The abusing parent has a world just as much a lie. The life of the suppressed Christian woman isn't as it should be; neither is the life of the suppressing Christian man as it should be. I want the women's roles to be as they should be in our church, so I will know who I am in Christ and His Body.

God bless us all.

Moon at Perigee

Last night the moon was 14% larger and 30% brighter than the normal full moon. Over the last two nights, the moon has been stunning. It is at perigee in its orbit. The moon's elliptical orbit has a point at which the moon is most distant from the earth: its apogee. It also has its perigee: the point in the orbit closest to the earth. At this perigee point, we get a bigger, brighter moon. 

When I looked at that moon last night, I thought, "I want to shine like that! In this dark world, I want to shine like that!" So do I really? Like the moon, do I want to orbit closer and closer to the source of my light? What would that mean for me? For any of us?

You see, I think I get accustomed to God being at a certain distance. God can have so much influence in my life and no more. I am willing to have a certain love and life that looks like it has come under his influence. But I have been tempted to set a boundary to just how close I will get. I have guarded the radius of my God orbit.

My prayer in the moonlight was for God to draw me closer. I wanted the distance between the Light and the satellite to close down, so the light reflected from me would be more and more. I could hear the lyrics to the old song: "draw me nearer, nearer, nearer blessed Lord." Then to the world around and, even to my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, I could be 14% closer and 30% brighter in the fellowship of Christ and the glory of His Spirit.

What if we all decided to get closer to the Light? What if we and our church were suddenly unhooked from our orbits and began plunging into the very heart of God? Oh how we would shine!

God help us all.

NEW YEAR 2009

The beginning of a new year around a church holds natural hazards. One can easily get trapped into "snappy sayings for the new year" mode in which things like "church is mighty fine in 2009" come too quickly to mind. Bold, new, world-changing initiatives tempt always: we promise that this year we are going to eliminate poverty and homelessness within 25 miles of our building, or we begin here and now a year without an ambiguous statement from the pulpit. At the beginning of the year, I can fall into the traps of empty exuberance. 

On the other hand, and you knew there would be an "on the other hand," another kind of trap looms at the beginning of the year: the trap of informed, smug cynicism.  The bitter cynic looks at the new year as an illusion of hope against the backdrop of the meaninglessness of the universe. The cynic says nothing is going to help. Nothing new is better than any of the things that have failed before. All the optimistic plans and words are just the brass band at the front of the parade. At the end of the day all that will be left will be trash in the gutters and horse manure in the street. Rosy, huh? Don't want to be that guy either.

So here at the beginning of the year what is the right thing to do. For most of us the right thing to do is take the opportunity to begin again. Go ahead, against all the cynical wisdom of experience. I think it is better to risk failure than to fail to try at all. Living a life of limiting losses by refusing to hope can hardly be the Christian approach to life. 

God is all about new beginnings. "This is the day the Lord has made! I will rejoice and be glad in it" sounds like we get to begin anew every day. The phases of the moon preach monthly renewal. The coming of Spring heralds seasonal hope. "Happy New Year!" is an annual breath of fresh air. But our renewal is based on more than celestial mechanics. Our renewal is based on our faith in the One Who Makes Things New — not on our ability to forget our past failures and try again with the same old self. 

Our new days are possible because we ourselves can be different. We ourselves are not who we were in 2008. Already in 2009, the Father, Son and Spirit have transformed us in some way. We may be pessimistic about our ability to have a better year this year looking at our own limited capacities. But we can be optimistic about the future knowing God is making us fit for it. Between shallow optimism and bitter cynicism stands new life in Jesus. Let's take his hand and walk into a happy new year.