Giving up stuff I like makes me loathe Lent (*alternate purpose & plan included)

Giving up sweets, throwing away all chocolate, hiding the remote control, heading to bed earlier, putting away beer/wine, a fast from Facebook. This was the Lent of my childhood - except for Facebook (illegitimate for an 80s child) and beer (illegal for any child). Now fasting from these may prove a valuable discipline. I think it was Thomas Merton who once said: We should periodically abstain from any habit or indulgence to make sure we are not, in fact, enslaved to it. It's often when we intentionally remove an indulgence, habit, or possession that we realize it has owned us - not the other way around.  

True fasting is feasting. The 'part of us' we kind of miss lends us opportunity to further feast on Jesus for true life (John 6:57). Thus, the lenten season affords us a deliberate season of time to further experience the generosity of Jesus through taking that initial step of generously giving of yourself. The feast is the goal - not the fast!!

The idea behind Lent is to imitate Jesus who for 40 days fasted from food and abstained every other tempting indulgence offered him by Satan in the wilderness - money, political power, glory, pride (Luke 4:1-13). Why did he do this? To show that he could? No. To show us how we too can be rigorously self-disciplined? That's frightening. He stepped into concentrated evil - 40 years of temptation rolled into 40 days - so he could feast on his two rewards: Making Dad smile and being with the kids (see Isaiah 53:10). To elaborate: 1. Pleasing His Father (John 4:34) and 2. Being with you and me forever (by crediting his perfectly-lived life to our account - thus, he had to face just-like-us temptation without messianic short-cuts but could not falter). Jesus likewise fasted in order to feast.

An alternate and better purpose for Lent. Even as a liturgical past faded, I entered my adult years covertly loathing Lent and I've never really 'done' anything with that. I don't dislike it any longer but I lend to Lent little to no thought.  My heart & head are finally coming together to agree: Lent is not about giving up but getting willingly caught up in the adventure of divine generosity. Generosity is a response to a gift received (John 1:12) and a gift promised (Matthew 6:20). It's that first step that is so dang hard! A true sacrifice feels like a lonely step into oblivion. However, while it always feels like the sacrificial step of giving hurts to the point that it pinches (or even past the pinch!), the final word on the sacrifice is never pain, there is never an isolated gift, there is never an unnoticed deed, there is never an act of generosity that won't be rewarded with further generosity (2 Corinthians 9:11), even as we remember ultimate generosity (2 Corinthians 8:9).

An alternate and better plan for Lent. So I want to encourage you with a better plan for lent: Over the next 40 days resolve to get caught up in the adventure of feasting on divine generosity - and there is no other way than taking that first "pinching" step into what-seems-like-lonely-oblivion.

Here is the practical piece: Get a generosity challenge to your inbox every day until Easter. Sign up here. To the right you'll see a preview from the 40 Acts: Do Lent Generously Challenge. It also includes 3 different ways to complete each daily act (below). Take a moment to ask God if He would want you to join in. Other than receiving communications through obscure Briticisms (get ready for a "chin-wag" on Day 2), I have no idea what to expect but ... I'm up for a bit of adventure.

Your Christianity shouldn't work - A meditation in the middle of 1 John

And now, little children, abide in him, so that when he appears we may have confidence and not shrink from him in shame at his coming. If you know that he is righteous, you may be sure that everyone who practices righteousness has been born of him. See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason the world does not know us is because it did not know him. Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we will be like him, because we will see him as he is. Everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. 1 John 2:28-3:3

Fellow Christian, knowing that you are "righteous" (2:29) because of Jesus' righteousness, trusting you are a son or daughter of God the Father because Jesus became your brother (3:1-2), acknowledging your status as pure because "he is pure" (3:3), can only help you to live both freely and productively. The victory has preceded the final total, the verdict has preceded the performance, and your adoption has preceded your family resemblance (to Jesus). So you and I are released by Jesus from the fear of not being enough to genuine change because He is enough. 

By most measures, those attracted to
& sustained by the gospel should
be more like Wonka's Veruca Salt.

Consider: Every other religion/life-philosophy attracts and maintains allegiance through (a) works which may or may not be enough on the divine scale or (b) the fleeting results (ie. temporary forms of peace, stillness, vigor, confidence) of rigorous discipline which no one can forever maintain. The gospel message contains an offer to rescue us from death to life, separation to reconciliation, godlessness to God-in-you immediately, permanently, and for free! This should never work as a religion or life-philosophy because all of its adherents would be like spoiled children who always get their dessert at the beginning of every meal and their allowance prior to doing their chores! Yet adherents to the good news have historically done more work of significance and societal transformation than any other (though no such work is required). Furthermore, people who derive life from the gospel message also endure over the long haul in varying disciplines (although rigorous discipline is no condition for entrance). 

Significant works, societal transformation, rigorous self-discipline might not be the phrases you'd use to characterize your life at this point - though you'd wish to. Do not dismay! The process of maturity is typically subtle and non-obvious to the one who is actually changing. This is why the apostle gives us the hope of certain victory 3:1-2: "We shall be like him because we shall see him as he is" (3:2). And so then says: "Everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure" (3:3). During either the heat of battle or tepid doldrums when, in either case, little progress seems to be made, we are reminded that we will one day fast-forward to the likeness and glory of Jesus - at which point we will realize that He had all along been inching our resemblance far closer to the final result than we had imagined.

And at which point, every tongue will confess: It really did work!

Providence or Parasite? (Sun Am Follow-up)

Sunday morning I had the privilege of leading our people to consider and apply Mark's version of one of Jesus' most famous and beloved miracles - the Feeding of the 5k (I can only assume because everyone loves food especially when super-sized miraculously!! Hollywood made their own version of miraculous food multiplication but Jesus' is the original). Mark's version focuses intently on the need for rest or, more broadly to include fun & play, "leisure" (6:31). Disciples of Jesus Christ are called to work hard and be used by Jesus (6:7-13), risk much for Jesus (6:14-29), but also plan to rest with Jesus (6:30-47). However, along the way, to increase our trust in Jesus, he may plan to satisfy you with a season of more work or more rest. The point is: Doing His will & letting his will, whatever it may be, satisfy you is the best R&R we can get. It was out of trust in His Father that Jesus himself said when his disciples were encouraging him to rest & eat: "My food is to do the will of Him who sent me and to accomplish his work" (John 4:34). 

So plan for work for and be used by Jesus, plan to rest with Jesus, but satisfy yourself with whatever Jesus brings your way.

The set-up. That's about as far as I could get on Sunday. But I left out an important question when it comes to "whatever," or more specifically, "whomever," Jesus brings your way. Some thing or, rather, some ones come between the prospect of rest and the reality of more "work" for the disciples:

"Now many of them saw [the disciples and Jesus retreating by themselves to a desolate place] and recognized them, and they ran there on foot from all the towns and got there ahead of them" (Mark 6:33). 

Some of you know this scene from your own life. Understand, due to the position of the Sea of Galilee set in a bowl from which you could see people heading down from the hills and the relatively small size of the Sea, the disciples were watching as in slow motion the reality ahead of them developing. Tired, having given all you can give, people - perhaps some of them the same people you just ministered to - are U-turning back your way to ask for more. Is such a person part of God's providence - His gracious plan for every thought, action, and member of His creation - OR parasite - someone who has begun to look to you and depend on you for what only Jesus can provide them? Providence or Parasite?  (**Please note: I recognize each person as inestimably valued by God and created in His image - only that some persons begin to function parasitically in certain relationships)

Fleshy hearts are always the right start. Something happens when you trust your life to Christ and begin to walk with him: You wish to pass on the same love with which Jesus has loved you. You are not only gifted with a new kind of love but a totally new heart: 

Ezekiel 36:25-27   ²⁵ I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you.  ²⁶ And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.  ²⁷ And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.

You may have cared for people before, but there always a hint of selfishness - whether it be to 'have that good feeling,' elicit a response from another, or what at the time seemed like a wholly altruistic purpose but now you recognize: "that was mostly for me." When Jesus invades your life, you learn to love freely because He puts His free love into this free heart given to you. Something else happens: You learn that growth as a Christian continues along as you begin to help another along to further trust and grow in Jesus. It was as a young Christian I heard Dr. Howard Hendricks say: "We begin to grow when we begin to take responsibility for another person." All of this is good and right. But there is a seedy underbelly for taking responsibility for growth of others that begins to show itself when (not if) others exploit it. Please hear me: As a Christian you can't avoid being exploited and used - when you offer to others in word & deed a message of a free gift apart from works - some will take the free gift and rob your works. However, I'm talking about the occasional person you will run across who takes and takes and takes. How can you tell such a person apart from them being someone God has providentially put in your path?

Understanding shepherds. I think our first clue in answering this question comes in Mark 6:34: "When [Jesus] went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. And he began to teach them many things." Jesus had compassion. Though the crowd was filled with liars, cheaters, hypocrites, users-of-people, holier-than-thous, it is toward such (like us) Jesus has compassion. Compassion is a fantastic word - the Gk. is splangnizesthai which lit means "a longing from the bowels." This suggests that Jesus' physical constitution was affected - their pain literally makes him sick to his stomach. Again, the tender, responsive, fleshy middle - where the heart is located - is exemplified in Jesus. Why is Jesus splangnizethai'd? "Because they were like sheep without a shepherd." So Jesus will be their shepherd, right? He will hold them in his arms, cuddle closely, feel the warmth of his heartbeat against theirs. Except that would entirely misunderstand what Jesus means here by "shepherd." The shepherd/sheep metaphor in the Old Testament is indeed a rich one, but also perhaps misunderstood. James Edwards notes in his commentary on Mark: 

"As a metaphor, the shepherd of sheep was a common figure of speech for a leader of Israel like Moses (Isa. 63:11) or more often of a Joshua-like military hero who would muster Israel's forces for war (Num 27:17; 1 Kings 22:17; II Chronicles 18:16; Jeremiah 10:21; Ezek. 34:5; Ezek 37:24; Nahum 3:18; Zechariah 13:7). It is, in other words, a metaphor for hegemony, including military leadership and victory. In his compassion, Jesus sees a whole people...without a leader." 

In other words, these aren't people looking to mooch off the disciples, tell their sob story for the umpeenth time hoping someone will finally take them in as their own, nor be adopted as the sole and consuming pet project of one of the disciples, nor stop by every so often fishing for affirmation and compliments - these in Mark 6 are looking for a strong leader to lead them that they might become strong. Another way to put it: Some are looking to stay coddled lambs always nursing on newborn milk, but not here - these are looking to be healthy functioning, and productive sheep - dare I say: Strong Rams. Such people approach you in weakness but also seek guidance toward deliverance and change. 

Don't get me wrong, these are all wonderful images of Jesus that you may find in any church nursery built in the 1970s.

Teach us to care through prayer. Jesus leads others to himself by teaching them "many things" (v.34). This is how he begins to shepherd people looking for genuine change. While teaching truth about Jesus has a critical place, we can begin to lead others to the Shepherd through prayer. One reason prayer I have found prayer not just spiritually but also practically so helpful is that early on in an encounter or relationship prayer begins shed light upon whether the person has come to find life or to rob it. 

A busy man once relayed to Oswald Sanders: 

"Up to some years ago, I was always annoyed by interruptions...then the Lord convinced me that He sends people our way. He sent Philip to the Ethiopian eunuch. He sent Barnabas to Saul. So when someone comes in, I say, 'The Lord must have brought you here. Let us find out why He sent you. Let us have prayer.' This does two things. The interview takes on new importance because God is in it. And it generally shortens the interview...pleasant but brief." 

What I have found fascinating is that often times people don't really want prayer - they get antsy when I suggest it or, upon saying "Amen," immediately continue on with the complaint right where they left off as if prayer were a sneeze or a yawn mid-sentence that has no bearing on one's stream of thought - not to mention attitude or perspective. Prayer then either: (a) Brings the person to the One who can give life, sustain growth, and transform weakness to strength; or (b) Exposes an unwillingness to change. I've found great assistance from the Psalms so that I'm not just praying my own words but God's and subtly teaching the person to develop their own prayer language with Him also. I've also found it helpful to have a "go-to" Psalm. Mine is Psalm 130 (It gives a person words to the need for both help from circumstances and forgiveness from sin, truth that God alone can forgive, insistence on how we are to wait upon the Lord, and why God alone satisfy us - all in 8 verses!). Sometimes I'll pray it out loud but if I have a second Bible handy I encourage the person to look and pray with me.

Eugene Petersen wrote a brilliant article years ago, which was also a chapter title in a book of his, called "Teach us to care, and not to care." His thoughtful expose really helped me answer the question: How do you help people who wish to be helped and how can you tell who those people are? I'll leave you with this lengthy excerpt:

I do not mean simply praying for people, although that is involved. I mean teaching them to pray, helping them to listen to what God is saying, helping them to form an adequate response. Teaching people to pray is teaching them to treat all the occasions of their lives as altars on which they receive his gifts. Teaching people to pray is teaching them that God is the one with whom they have to deal, not just ultimately, and not just generally, but now and in detail.

  Teaching people to pray is not especially difficult work — anyone of us can do it, using a few psalms and the Lord’s Prayer — but it is difficult to stick with it, for we are constantly interrupted with urgent demands from family and friends to, as they say, “do something.” And it is difficult to get the person who has asked for help to stick with it because there are a lot of other people in the intersection, offering short-cut approaches for providing care, shortcutting God and promising far quicker results. It is difficult for all of us to stick it out, for often in the confusion and noises of wasteland traffic, it is hard to stay convinced that sin and God make that much difference.

   But difficult or not, this is our calling. Whatever else we are doing is with our hands, with our feet, with our minds — bandaging, directing, giving. This is the core of what we are doing, getting them in touch with God, with neighbor, receiving love, grace. If we do not use these occasions of need to teach people to pray, we cave in to the pressures of care in which there is no cure.

Danger of Christian Karma during the charitable Season of Christmas

Many of you - as we have recently done at SCC - have just recently completed filling bags for the hungry to receive a Christmas meal, purchased a Christmas gift for a child who has an incarcerated parent, or even assembled your family to collectively "give back" during this holiday season.

Speaking from a wealth of charitable experience, Peter Greer, President/CEO of Hope International gives us in this brief interview a prophetic warning and opens up about his own "buying-in" to Christian Karma (ie. if I do good, God has no choice but to bless me). These lines alone are well worth the read:

The only antidote that enables us to truly sustain our service is to constantly remember that our service is downstream from the gospel. We fight hopelessness and discouragement by constantly returning to the Cross and the empty tomb. Then we get to work loving our neighbors in response to the grace we've already experienced.

YES! "Constantly returning to the cross" - something I have to tell myself about a dozen times a day for my love to last and with pure, God-ward intentions.

May God richly bless your blessing others this Christmas as you return & respond to the greatest blessing of all - the bottomless fuel of the grace of God expressed through the cross of Christ and the empty tomb. 

Relating to my church when I don't have kids

Katie and I recently returned from an amazing vacation during which, for the first time in seven years, we were able to leave our kids behind. One of the nights we were away a single friend in our church body, who is very precious to us, was gracious enough to watch our children. In some ways, it might have been easier to have our boys stay "with a friend" that night - a typical nuclear family. But three factors opened the door: (a) Intentionally broadening our horizons (and conversations and things in common) to befriend our brothers and sisters free of children; (b) That person intentionally broadening their horizons to befriend a family with children. Katie, myself, and our boys were immensely blessed by our friend taking two nights (one to orient herself with their schools and their routines) to serve our family;  (c) Jesus Himself, through whom such possibilities of unlikely friendships become possible (see Ephesians 2:11-22). And so we reached out and asked a favor which she could meet and did...

As the years go by participating as a significant member of one's church and you are single without children or married without children, I recognize there exists a distinct possibility of feeling alienated or, at least, just that little amount of distance from those with children - enough to hinder friendship beyond the occasional handshake, hello, and hug.

I've pasted below (was having problems with the url link) a wonderful testimony by a woman named Erin Lane - who is both a significant member of her local church and who has chosen to be married without children. I think she gets somewhere near the heart of the right reasons to choose life without children or, if unable to have children or single, some ideas to connect and be a blessing without children. Both those with and without children might profit from her story...

I am a young Christian women who doesn’t have children. I suppose the more interesting thing to folks is that I am a married woman with no plans on having future children of my own. I have ventured so far as to call this choice not just a lifestyle preference but a sacrifice, and one that serves the common good.

The common good is a concept that is as illusory as it is necessary. I understand what it means and am able to give voice to it on a larger scale only in as much as I can witness it playing out locally. I could spout arguments as others have about how our remaining childless may be good for this reason or that, but the best argument I can give for our choice is that it’s good for my neighbor. This I’ve seen with my own two eyes. I’ve heard it with perked ears.

We were hiking along a leaf-littered path, making our way up to the hermitage. I was on the heels of our pack leaders, two women who looked to be in their early forties. They chatted easily with one another, and I eavesdropped behind them. This, I determined, was less awkward than side winding around them and forging a path to the top of the mountain alone. We were after all on a church women’s retreat. “Community time” was part of the point.

It didn’t matter that they were taking about their kids, and I had none.

The theme of our retreat was celebration. The context was the Sabbath. Jennifer, our speaker for the weekend, told us of her time living in Jerusalem as a Christian single woman and how the city became a ghost town on Friday afternoons as people scurried home to prepare for their weekly day of rest. Sabbath wasn’t just a day of self-care, as it is sometimes practiced today in the West. It was about a community resting in rhythm. Singles and marrieds came together to eat, drink, and bless each other as one family.

“You can join us, you know,” the one in the running jacket said looking back at me. “But you might be bored.”

I laughed, awkwardly, and propelled my pace. “I don’t mind hearing about your kids.” Women are always apologizing to me for talking about their kids. They want to assure me that they’re not “that kind of woman.” I want to assure them that I think motherhood is a vocation to mull over just as much as mine is as a writer.

The other woman with a fleece tied around her waist caught me up. “We were just saying how there’s no way we could take a Sabbath with small children at home.”

Running woman continued. “I can give Dan time off from the kids to relax, but that means I’m taking them to the park or dreaming up an art project or just supervising free play. And then we switch, and I go for a run or grab a glass of wine but there’s no way we can really rest together.”

She tilted her face up to the hills, as if she were talking to herself now. “Those young women talk like it’s easy to rest. But the weekend isn’t restful.”

I strained my neck further so that it stuck out ever so slightly between them. “That’s where I come in.” Even as the words came out of my mouth, it sounded like a strange thing to say to these strange women I had just met. I had only been going to this church a little over a year but, still, I said, “That’s where a woman without children comes in.”

Without kids of our own, we practice the ministry of availability. When the sign-up sheet at church goes around for our night of ministry to the homeless, my husband and I always take the slot no one wants – the overnight guests. We are the ones with back’s strong enough to sleep on couches in the church parlor but old enough to handle a crisis together between either male or female guests. We don’t have to arrange a sitter for the dog we leave at home, and we can catch up on sleep in the quiet of our house come morning.

Without kids of our own, we practice the ministry of flexibility. It is that season of life when many of our female friends either have a belly full of baby or breasts full of milk. Young ones with new names are popping up down the block and across town at rates we’ve never before witnessed. We are learning there are feeding schedules and sleeping schedules and nary a moment for the happy hours and dinner parties of yesteryear. Fine, we say. Let us come to you. Not doing dairy because Malificent has reflux? We’ll thicken our broth with flour. Not sure when Alastair will wake up from his nap? We’re just watching Nashville, so text us when you’re ready. We have time. We’re not going anywhere.

And finally, without kids of our own, we practice the ministry of hospitality. We welcome the stranger in other people’s children. “I don’t want to staff the nursery during worship,” a young mom once lamented to me. “I’m always at the nursery.” Just because I don’t have kids, doesn’t mean I don’t like them—or understand the gifts that they are.

It was like I said on that long walk up to the hermitage. Let me watch your kids. Let me help you to be available to your partner. Let me help you be flexible with your friends. Let me help you be hospitable to the stranger in me. It’s not that you can’t practice these ministries as parents, only that it looks different when you are committed to a nuclear family.

We’ve gotten some flack for our decision to remain childless that’s hard to understand. People argue it’s not natural. That it’s selfish. Or that it’s endangering the future of the human race. I don’t think the future of the human race has ever been served by all people making the same choice. It’s the diversity of our choices that allow for us to rest in rhythm as a church community. It’s when the music starts to play and we begin to tap our feet and after listening for a beat, we can say, “That’s where I come in.”

  

A Teenager's Sermon Notes

Had opportunity yesterday to preach on Isaiah 58 & a paradox walking with Jesus of Receiving Through Giving. In case you don't want to bother listening, one teenager gave me permission to share the notes she took.

That pretty much sums it up!