Monthly Archives: November 2007

The Lives of Others

My sister told me this was a film not to miss, and Saturday night, Anjie and I finally sat down to watch The Lives of Others.   This gorgeous film is the story of the German Democratic Republic’s surveillance of their own citizens in the years before the wall came down.   It’s 1984 East Berlin, and an officer of the Stasi, the GDR’s strong-armed national security team, is given an assignment: spy on a prominent playwright in hopes of catching him in subversive activity.  As the officer–Wiesler by name–listens in to the private life of this playwright and his lover, a prominent actress, his heart opens to the world in a stunningly-played rebirth of spirit that proves costly.  It is a quiet film that insinuated itself into my heart before I knew it.  It challenged me to pay attention, to stay engaged with beauty, and to answer the call for justice even in the face of personal loss and sacrifice.

The power of our lives to impact others, and their power to impact us–it comes even as we live in our privacy.  As Stephen Sondheim says in Into the Woods, “No one is alone.  You move just a finger, say the slightest word, something’s bound to linger, be heard.”

The Lives of Others…a great film…

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Vision

A magic word, vision. A glimpse of some future reality that might come to pass. A quick flash of insight that compels us to push forward with new energy and new hope. A slight intuition that speaks of more life pouring in, more friends gathered for the journey, more people lifted from brokenness and despair. A brief, fleeting thought that dares us to think it: perhaps we can change, finally grow up, finally find wholeness, maturity, and on the best days, a touch of the holy.

They say vibrant, alive churches have this is common: a simple vision. Maybe the same could be said of theatres, companies, and social clubs. Maybe it’s core to being human; that’s what we say in the theatre. Behavior is driven by desire. What we want. Marcus Buckingham says our appetites drive our behavior, our desires, and vision grows from that. Even the vision of being completely committed to doing God’s will instead of our own is a vision related to what we want, which is to know God, please Him, and have His power in our lives.

At church I’ve been teasing a sense of vision out of the people by constantly referring to the “Joe Girardi Jersey.”  The new skipper of the Yankees passed on wearing his usual #25 from his playing days, opting instead to wear #27.  The Yankees have won 26 world titles, so Girardi is declaring his goal on the back of his jersey for the whole world to see.  I’ve been asking the church about what they would put on the back of our jersey if we had one.  Yesterday, I told them to hone their “back of the jersey” thought to one sentence–two to five words if they could do it–and they’ll turn those in next week.   Perhaps it will give us a sense of what is going on in the minds of the people as they look toward the future.  I’m terribly interested to what kind of vision our church family has.

I know what two words I’d use…

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“Busy” and The Bottom Line

Busy. Perhaps the word that best describes the culture we live in, “busy” has arrived. I’m reminded of the days of working as a university professor, with its crush of class prep, committees, and productions to direct or build props for. Multi-tasking is everywhere, and the hours race by as I move from meeting to meeting, squeezing in time to prep for Christmas Musical rehearsals or production meetings, as well hunting the quiet needed for preparing the sermon and the supporting materials (powerpoint and handouts).

It’s all good, but I wonder about the bottom line.

As I talk with the people that make up the life of the Northwest Church in Shoreline, I always wonder what their bottom line is. The bottom line at the end of the day that makes what they do worth it, the bottom line that serves as the assessment tool we must use to discover our effectiveness in ministry, as well as effectiveness in “stewarding” the gifts, talents, and resources the Holy Spirit has given us.

It can’t be the kind of bottom line the world uses, can it? Maybe “the bottom line” is another of way of saying “purpose” or “mission” or “focus.” The discussion (debate) of the purpose or mission of the church is long and storied, and in many ways is the story of the history of Christ’s church.

Last night, as I was driving to rehearsal, a thread came together in my mind that relates to God’s initial creation, the work of the artist to make a thing, and the Pauline idea of being transformed, or having Christ “formed” in us. I’ve been talking about life being the point of creation, as well as the point of “salvation.” (“I came that they might have life and have it more abundantly”). With that in mind, I keep coming back to the idea of lives that are formed and transformed, becoming new “creations.”

What’s up for grabs in popular culture these days are definitions of nearly everything. What is life? What constitutes the well-lived day? What is primary when it comes to energy spent, resources allocated, and tasks undertaken? This question haunts us at the personal level, the corporate level, and certainly in the gatherings of the people of God. God alone holds the meaning and purpose of life. For me just now, I keep hearing the phrase “lives transformed.” I keep the voice of an elder of a church back in Virginia, a man I stayed with a couple of years ago on a trip to perform Leaving Ruin. He was constantly full of a quiet enthusiasm, and his eye was strong and alive with light. He said of the church there, which was a growing, vibrant place, “If it’s not about changing lives, we don’t do it. We’re just jazzed about watching lives transform.” That’s not a direct quote, but was the gist of the weekend I spent with him.

I think that’s the bottom line. The love of the Christ transforming all the lives who come to Him.  Maybe that…is the glory of God.

Metamorphosis…

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Filed under Faith and Art

Looking for Inspiration

I’ve asked several people this week, what should happen on a Sunday morning, and one word keeps creeping in.  Not the only word, but a good one.

Inspiration.

So the people come to the church on Sunday morning, carrying their lives on their backs, the breakdowns in expectation of the previous weeks and months, the frustrations of all that didn’t go right, as well as the unexpected joys, gifts out of the blue, sudden attraction in relationships, good food and company that caught everyone by surprise.  They wake on Sunday morning, and decide to head to a church, for reasons numerous and diverse.  Maybe they want to see a friend, or lift their hands to God, or maybe they’re hoping to get a feeling of forgiveness for a shameful thing they’ve never been able to shake.  Maybe they’re dragging a spouse, thinking the spouse needs to change, and if the preacher will just say the right things, the home will become the place of comfort and refuge they dreamed of when they were little.   Or maybe they come because their parents beat it into them, and they can’t escape the guilt, so church is their penance, their sentence, and they suffer because they just can’t muster up the strength to say they don’t believe a word of it.

Or maybe every once in awhile there’s a person in love with the source of the divinity interlaced with every moment, every space, and every good thing.  Maybe they see glory, and they run to the house of God because they feel like the Psalmist, that a single day in the courts of God are better than a thousand in the richest palace elsewhere.

Not realizing, of course, that the courts of God are everywhere.

For whatever reason they come on a Sunday morning, the guy who gets to talk to them now is me.  No fancy language this, no religious upgrading speech–”God speaking through me” (though my faith is that something like that is exactly what happens.)  How astonishing–I get to sit across a table and talk to these people.  As if we were having coffee (though it’s not exactly like that, because I get to do all the talking), but here we sit together, both of us hoping for an intimate time, a time of truth-telling, comfort-giving, challenge-making, repentance-falling, glory-to-glory time.   We’re all looking for the same thing.  In our secret hearts, we are hoping that God will come to us, make us his home, just as Jesus said, and that we will receive a heaping dose of divine air, of divine oxygen, of the stuff of life.   What we want (as in desire, as is what we lack) is inspiration.

Inspired.

As Bill Hybels says, “Whatever you do, inspire me.”

Breathe on me, breath of God… 

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The Between Journey: Pilgrimage I

I guess I’m a preacher.

Yesterday, the elders prayed over me, and told me to go to work.  From an experiential point of view, the morning was amazing mostly because of the deep calm inside.  I’ve been in analogous situations before: being charged with certain responsibilities that carry significant weight.  All the other times, my heart would pound in that body-shaking way, and I would be able to take on whatever, but there was always a sort of fear/excitement that went along with it, voice shaking, crackling with energy, me pumping along hoping to get somebody going just by sheer strength of wild-eyed frenzy.

Yesterday, my heart was calm as a still lake.

I don’t know what it means, but the thought went through my head that this is what the fruit of the Spirit feels like.  Peace that passes understanding, a peace not generated out of my own restless desire to finally get my life right, or finally live up to what God has for me, or whatever other such notions normally have me in such a lather.  It is a simple place, a place of restful moving, living inside a dynamic situation with a certain ease because none of this depends on me (at least at the deepest and truest levels) or my increased levels of motivational hyperness.

The day was long.  As a congregation, we talked about the unsettled nature of the moment we found ourselves in and the fact that in the midst of all manner of unsettled moments, Jesus says, as he did in John 14:1, “Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust also in me.”  I told them we are going on a journey, and the first leg in pilgrimage in search of the holy place that is our own deep hearts and the heart of the Christ that is doing his work there through the Holy Spirit.   And I also told them I knew some of them were still wondering if this was a journey they wanted to be on.  That’s fine, I said.  But the invitation is open, and the desire is that the family that is this church moves together to the place God is calling us.

I asked very simply, “Are you coming?”

Then to touch base with our life group was great.   Our little group has been traveling together for several years now, and they know the truth about me, and will continue to treat me like the guy I am.  No preacherly treatment here.   Good friends, good food, challenging talk, and relationships I cherish.

Then the Christmas Musical Act I stumble-through.  We learned a lot, laughed hysterically through most of it, and rarely got impatient of panicky.  All good.  We’ve got lots of work to do, and it’s a real joy to see these people sing and dance and act in ways that normal life just won’t let them do.

Then the 6:00 o’clock hour came, and in came the giants.  I say the giants because about a dozen people gathered in our sanctuary to pray.  People that pray are giants, and I don’t mean the bad kind we have to face down.  I mean the kind that carry weary people on their backs all the way to the throne of the Father.   They prayed for an hour and a half, and I left bleary-eyed and humbled, knowing that God was indeed close to us, listening, watching, calling, healing, hovering over us as the Spirit did at the beginning, moving over the chaos preparing to create great beauty.

Movin’ out soon… 

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