Monthly Archives: April 2008

I’ve got words all over my room, my thoughts about values plastered here and there, asking in the deep-gut way what kinds of qualities in life are most important to me.  We are so bombarded with messages telling us what we should value.  Sometimes the shoulds ride on top in our consciousness so that we confuse what we should value with what we actually value.  Wikipedia says ” A value is an assumption upon which implementation can be extrapolated.”  The assumption part of that is interesting because it suggests that what we value is always operative in determining our action, even if that value is operating below the surface of consciousness.

So what do you value?

There are so many things vying for attention, but in no particular order, these are the words on my walls: truth, beauty, awe, grace, peace, creation, freedom, mystery, wisdom, word, people, love, service, knowledge, glory, image, right, good, Bible, mission, community, friends, family.  There’s more, but these are things that weave together to make my life.  What’s not on the list are a few other things my actions proclaim that I value, but I don’t like to them that way.  Maybe they are closer to core values than I’d like to admit.   Quiet.  Comfort.  Sensory stimulation.  Distraction.  Indulgence.  Wealth.  Ease.  Intellectual stimulation.  Admiration.  Praise.

I’m thinking about this because I’m praying and thinking about what our church values.  There are many things churches should value, and then there are the things churches actually value.  Truthfully, it seems that it doesn’t much matter what churches (or individuals) say they value–what they do with the minutes and hours of the day will tell everything needed to be known about values.  To play with Paul’s image of the church as the body, we are often like hands who know we should value picking up stuff and making stuff and helping out, but what we really value is rest and idleness and adornment and strength for the mirror’s sake.

But think about the differences among people, and the differences among hands.  Some hands like tools of machinery, other hands value tools of artistry, other hands value tools of gardening.  When I think of my values, I think of things that are core to who I am that others may or may not share.  Beauty and mystery are the two easiest to put here, because so many people don’t think about beauty and lots of people just flat out dislike mystery.

When it comes to churches, it seems what makes any body of people unique are not only the things they value (or care about), but they shared ways in which they value them.  Any church is a unique work of the Holy Spirit in a given time-space reality, impacted by culture, by generational understanding, and by the specific work of God in a given place.

Does your church have a list of shared values that reflect what they actually value?  Or does your church have one of those church lists that says what any church anywhere ought to value, but by their actions, clearly don’t.  Another to way to ask it is this:  do declarations of values reflect current reality, or call us to a new and different reality, shaping us by reaching toward the “ought”?

Valuing conversation…

A couple that moves across country with two children to a small apartment in a world where they know no one, admitting that loneliness kills. A different young couple in the first month of their marriage, checking out a church because they saw a sign on the road. A third young couple, unmarried, with a new child, the parents both admitting to and fighting addictions. A guitar player who has played in years, fighting to get his life back after a long struggle against meth. A woman with AIDS who smiles and talks to me about a film we both adore, as well as her struggle to find the housing she needs. A second man with AIDS who eats at my house every Sunday, eats like there is no tomorrow, and shuffles off at the end our life groups’ couple of hours together, headed for his weekly movie outing with his late-blooming Christ-following father. An artist who harbors various bitternesses about church of years past, but who graces us with his work and his joyful comedy and cynicism. A man sitting in my living room, quietly ruminating over the possibility of finding new meaning in his painting. A young filmmaker and his crew of brooding creatives working together to explore what love means, and what might happen if you fell in love with a pixie. Two women who meet on a business trip in Seattle and stumble into church looking for a service and landing in the middle of a church calling the Holy Spirit to come. The older woman who I adore who urges me to keep going, and the other older woman who brings me newspaper articles and tells me coffee is killing me, and to go get a concoction of something I can’t remember to replace what the coffee is robbing me of.

Churches aren’t buildings. They are collections of people. Great, real people who amble into a big box on a given Sunday hoping for something, wanting something, wanting magic, maybe, for the Spirit to zap them with something maybe, or maybe they just hope for a kind word, a touch of a compassionate look, a chance to plan a get-together later in the week, a cup of tea or coffee with the person who is their lifeline, without whom their lives might go plunging off a cliff of despair. Maybe they want to be left alone so they can meet with God, drag their shame to Him alone, not wanting anybody else to see it. And to be able to speak a word that says there is somewhere in the universe, in that maelstrom of reality both seen and unseen, somewhere out there is a being that loves beyond our imaginative capacity…what sheer joy, madness, difficulty, and grace.  But they sit there, and I can see it cross their faces so often, these questions that haunt them: how can I be loved? How is it possible after all of this, all the muck I’ve made of things, all the wounds and blood lying in the wake of who and what I’ve been? How is it possible that I’m loved, after all…. Is there forgiveness of my wreck of a time?  Redemption?  Life, indeed?

I love these people.

I love the God who chases them.

Come be a part…

I went to my usual coffee shop this morning for the latte and orange-cranberry scone and I noticed the barista taking my order, a young woman who’s been working there for several years as she completes her university education, was wearing something unusual around her neck.  I had to look more closely.  It was a sort of homemade medallion, an award of some kind, the kind of thing you might see around the neck of a child pretending they’d won an Olympic Gold medal.  The strap was polka-dotted, various pastels on a light blue background (I think, I might have the color wrong), and the medallion itself was about 3 inches in diameter.  I leaned down and read the inscription…”Badge of Shame.”

Needless to say, that was the last thing I’d expected the medallion to say, and I thought, okay, I have to ask.  So I did.  And the young woman said that she was wearing it because she had said something insensitive and unkind and so she was wearing the badge of shame.  And then she told me, even as a strange look hurried across her face, that it was sort of hard for her to wear.   I was astonished to realize that this was no joke, but that here in a public coffee shop, someone was declaring freely that they were ashamed of a particular action they had taken.

I spoke to the owner about it, who was actually making my latte.  He said an employee had been late earlier in the week and a customer who teaches at a Montessori school voluntarily decided to make a “badge of shame” for the coffee shop.  The owner said since then, various people have worn it, and that the most interesting thing was that each one put it on themselves.  No one was telling anyone to wear it.

Wow.  Metaphors for days.   What strikes me, though, is how my heart sort of melted for the woman wearing the badge.  In the moment that she confessed that wearing it was hard for her, I saw a vulnerability that can’t help but make you love someone.   At the Northwest Church, we’ve spoken a lot in recent months about a culture of confession, and the fact that to speak the truth about our own broken state is a kind of “doorway to freedom.”   The owner of the shop and I talked about so many people wear badges of shame all the time, hidden away, grafted onto their souls.

As I drove away, and as I sit here even now, I wonder if anyone is going to “forgive” her, extend her some grace, and if they did, would she receive it?

Grace is everything, everything is grace…

I told the assembly yesterday that in spite of my best efforts last week, I couldn’t really get my sermon to work. I knew what I wanted to say, and I knew where the text sort of needed to go, but I couldn’t put it into words. They were gracious as I stumbled my way through, but I never quite landed the words or the ideas I had in mind. Odd, and frustrating. But as I talked to people throughout the day, the ideas crystallized and I begin to find ways to express what I had in mind.

Luke 24:45 says simply that Jesus opened the minds of the disciples to understand the scriptures. What interested me was Christ’s role in this moment, and what actually happened. Was it hocus-pocus, him waving his arms over their foreheads so that a sort of curtain dropped away from their minds? I’m kidding, of course, but as I told the church, there are any number of Greek words here that Luke could have used to describe Jesus’ action (as opposed to dianoigo, which is translated “to open”). It seems that something only Christ could have done was in play, something more than him simply explaining things more clearly.

As we move toward Pentecost, the Holy Spirit (the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of Truth, the Comforter) is coming into our conversation. Traditionally, for the folks in our religious heritage, the Holy Spirit’s work has been relegated to “teacher,” being the agent by which we understand scripture. Fair enough, but so often, all that really meant was that we thought rationality and intelligence were somehow purged by pious living, and that if we thought hard enough, we’d get doctrine right, get our facts right, and we’d be good to go–no mess about power and healing and all that stuff. We are children of the Enlightenment, and whatever power will be exhibited will be in the realm of the rational, and it will manifest itself in little more than better ideas.

Now don’t get me wrong–ideas, in some sense, are everything. And I absolutely believe the Spirit of God is the means by which we will discover and engage God’s ideas of living. And no question but that the realm of intelligence and rationality is one of the primary environments in which this discovery will occur. In fact, I called the church to confession and repentance over our slacking approach to scripture these days. We must be far more rigorous than we’ve been in our study and understanding. We used to be far better students than we are today.

That said, we also need to acknowledge that only God can instruct us as we approach the text. For hundreds of years (and still today), skilled scholars and students of scripture missed the fact that, according to our faith and understanding, Old Testament prophecy pointed to Jesus as the anointed one. Rigor, intelligence, hard work, strict logic–these things alone do not add up to the discovery of the wisdom of God.   And power?  Well, I’ll come back to that…

Here’s the analogy I wish I’d used yesterday. Robert Grudin, in his wonderful book The Grace of Great Things, suggests (as do many others) that artistic inspiration cannot be commanded or controlled. In other words, inspiration shows up when it shows up. But he suggests that an environment can be created where inspiration will show far more often than not. He calls it an “ethos of inspiration.” In brief, all he really means is that a certain work ethic and attitude will create smoother pathways for inspiration to travel. A writer that writes everyday is going to be visited by his mysterious friend Inspiration far more often than the writer who sits waiting for inspiration to show up.

In the same way, those who dig into the word with sleeves rolled up and concentration focused are far more likely to hear where the Spirit is leading them than those who skim the text in a perfunctory daily read. The quality of our attention means much, much more than we think as we engage the living word of God.

Off to work, praying for inspiration…