Redefinition

A "purpose-driven life" is not one animated by pursuit of goals to accomplish (even for God) but a life lived intentionally, to experience life on purpose.

God's plan for my life (or yours) is not to achieve some lofty (or common, or even holy) purpose but to live in relationship with God, as God intended.

Something to think about...

This meme has been floating around the internets for a while. I got it via Bishop Mike.

Seth Godin has been making the point for a while, in books like Linchpin, that the world of work and the sources of good jobs have changed, yet schools haven't. He has a new manifesto posted now called Stop Stealing Dreams in which he claims that our misaligned education system does just that.

The work sphere reads the shift first, because the balance of profits and losses, costs and opportunities shift immediately. The modern school system developed to help meet the need the barons of capitalism had for a predictable supply of workers who could follow factory protocols. The church was already comfortable with having people sit in rows and the experts up front, and adapted its methods to take advantage of the new supply of good students ready to absorb expertise and follow the rules.

Here's my addition to the meme:

Yes, schools are evolving into spaces for group work and interaction -- when they are not busy teaching to standardized tests. But there is a bigger shift in learning going on. No, its not about technology, but is centered in the individualized, on-demand self-learning that is mediated by the availability of always-on technology. What does it mean for learning that a worshipper can learn more about the subject of a sermon from a smartphone right in the pew? That students can go online to access information and commentary that is newer than the latest books? That self-regulating communities of amateurs, like the contributors to Wikipedia, can produce resources that rival edited, refereed publications? We don't know for sure, but we know the energy is flowing away from the center.

Beyond the ongoing shift from the factory floor to the office park, increasing numbers of knowledge jobs are freeing workers from offices. They are finding synergy working in public spaces like coffeeshops, creating virtual communities some wags have dubbed "laptopistan." And professionals working from home offices are banding together to support co-working spaces, in which knowledge workers share space with peers from outside their own corporation or agency. While many people have trouble recognizing these as workspaces, think of the collaboration and cross-pollenization and plain old inspiration that can launch in these spaces.

Its not clear what church in this new world should look like. But it's clear we have to respond.

Refocusing for Lent

Ash Wednesday: Isaiah 58:1-12

As many of us prepare to receive the sign of ashes to begin our Lenten journey, the Prophet Isaiah offers wise words to put our action into perspective. To bow down on our knees and wear ashes, to dress humbly and go without food, is not acceptable to God if the purpose is to call God’s attention to our faithfulness in participating in the rituals.

We live in a world where there are no sinless options, and our motives are often mixed. We are all colored with the brush of a society where others have to work to provide us with our day off. Our self-interest, God’s interests and the interests of “the least of these” are often confused and conflated, both when we ignore the needs of the poor and when we provide easy service to make ourselves feel better.

The fast God desires – today and everyday – looks more like this: Seeking to end injustice even when that means ending the extra benefits I receive from that injustice. Making my daily bread feed not just my family but some others who are hungry. Not turning my face from those who are homeless and ill-clothed but seeing them as my brothers and sisters. Daring to ask why we place heavy yokes on the shoulders of many people in the name of self-sufficiency.

We, of course, cannot live this acceptable fast perfectly, or even well. Even with our best intentions we quietly slip back into our own lives and motivations. That is why we need Ash Wednesday. We need to come together with others, with fellow travelers and fellow citizens, to be reminded that God desires better for us and for all God’s children, and that God has empowered us to do better.

One of the prayers in the Ash Wednesday liturgy has us pray these petitions:

For self-centered living,and for failing to walk with humility and gentleness:
Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and immortal,
have mercy on us. 

For longing to have what is not ours,
and for hearts that are not at rest with ourselves:
Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and immortal,
have mercy on us.

For misuse of human relationships,
and for unwillingness to see the image of God in others:
Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and immortal,
have mercy on us.

The discipline and journey of Lent is not about denying ourselves some of our favorite pleasures nor even about taking on new service to others in need (although both can be very helpful practices). Lent is about refocusing our internally directed vision and seeing with new, clear eyes. Seeing that I am not God. Seeing that the reflection of God that is in me is in everyone I meet. Seeing that I already have so much more than I could ever lack.

May you see God and yourself more clearly this Lenten season.

(Prayer quoted from Evangelical Lutheran Worship)

Desperate housewife

The Bride of Christ, the mystical community of saints called to follow their Lord, is beautiful. She is ravishing in spite of her blemishes; her humanity acknowledges her divine nature.

Like a desperate housewife, though, this bride struggles with situations and expectations she is barely aware of. She wraps herself in vintage dresses of liturgy and music not to honor the path they describe but to insist on their timeliness by the very wearing. She chafes against necklaces of inherited dogma and a belt of tradition that make her movements slow and less agile. Her gait is hobbled by the tight shoes of hierarchy and privileged leadership.

Instead of dancing freely in the world, she is often found kneeling with a bucket and brush, doing housework. She is stuck in the kitchen and the pulpit even as a hurting world beckons her to help. Sometimes she teaches her children to fight rather than to cooperate; she may impart separateness, pride and apathy -- the opposite of what she wishes to teach. Often the ruminations of her mind overwhelm the meditations of her heart. Caring for her clan and setting the table for their meals, she can be so busy with many things that she forgets the one thing that is needful -- listening at the feet of her Bridegroom.

But it does not have to be this way.

I hear this mystical bride (not just denominations or congregations but what Luther called the "hidden" Church) mumbling and yearning for a better life. She longs to be light on her feet and follow her husband's lead. She longs to untether herself from the house and immerse herself in the pain and joy and boredom of ordinary life outside on the streets, as the Bridegroom did. She desperately wants to raise children who want as much to live out a new kingdom now as think about heaven someday.

It's up to us.

How we lead, how we participate in or consume her, these define the extent to which she is bound to our notions or free to follow her Spirit. How we treat her matters to her husband.

What will he say about what we have done -- or not done?

Going down to go up

Mk. 9:30-37

Just as Peter did a few days ago, when he rebuked Jesus for talking of his coming death, the disciples in this reading are again confused and disarmed by Jesus’ frank talk of his necessary fate. I understand their befuddlement. It is hard to hear that the one you left everything for – nets, families, familiarity – is headed for what most would consider a failure. Even his promise that he will rise in three days has no reference in their experience. What’s interesting is their response.

Instead of facing the uncertainty and asking Jesus to explain himself, they simply ignore the part they don’t understand and don’t want to hear and busy themselves with…arguing about which one of them is most important! Delicious irony. Their dreams of high regard are a way of not dealing with the fact that Jesus, the one who actually is the greatest, must cast all that aside in order to fulfill his purpose. No wonder they were silent when Jesus asked them what they had been talking about.

It is easy for us to get caught up in this same trap, to focus on God’s power and Jesus’ glorification and to assume that we will be rewarded with what the world will call success. But this ignores what Luther called the theology of the cross and what Richard Rohr calls the language of descent. If God chooses to show power veiled by what our culture views as weak, who are we to think that we are rewarded more than we must empty ourselves?

Jesus’ response is to gently bring them back to kingdom reality. It requires a mind shift – the back of the line is really the front, and the place to lead from is under the heap, not on top. How we honor God depends not on how we defer to power but how we welcome and honor the weak and defenseless. This is not a perspective our natural minds, steeped in a culture of strength and privilege, comes to on its own. But stopping to listen to Jesus in a loving relationship, and being bold enough to express our questions and doubts, can open us up to this bigger picture.

Isaiah 64:1-9

Oh, that you would rip open the heavens and descend, make the mountains shudder at your presence—
As when a forest catches fire,
    as when fire makes a pot to boil—
To shock your enemies into facing you,
    make the nations shake in their boots!

The prophet speaks for people of all times when he voices the desire for God to show up -- right now! -- to defend his holiness and his people. Preachers and politicians still call on God to stand up for the righteousness of their cause. The problem, as Isaiah goes on to say, is that none of us meet the standards of that God:

Is there any hope for us? Can we be saved?
We're all sin-infected, sin-contaminated. 
   Our best efforts are grease-stained rags.
We dry up like autumn leaves— 
   sin-dried, we're blown off by the wind.

Advent is a season when we want to hold these realities in tension. We want our desire for God's presence with us to boil over, not to highlight other's defects but to make friends with our own "grease-stained rags." 

This is the good news: Our God, who could descend from the severed heavens and send chills down the spines of the powerful, instead chooses to come quietly as a vulnerable child in a filthy stable, revealed to animals and shepherds instead of priests and princes. The Christ is humble, to teach us to surrender our pride. He is vulnerable, to teach us that we can soften and risk for the sake of love. He "empties himself" (in St. Paul's phrase) to show us how to let go of our illusions of control. He is poor, to remind us where our true wealth lies.

Still, God, you are our Father. 
   We're the clay and you're our potter: 
   All of us are what you made us.

What's the goal?

Photo: angietorres

A friend recently described for me her church's confirmation class' goal of "ending hunger in our town by the time we graduate."

How excellent it is to see the church's young people focused out on the world and hoping to bring a congregation along with them. Theirs is a goal that exudes youthful exuberance and confidence that "we can do anything we put our minds to." We need that kind of faithful response, trusting that with God all things are possible. Even if it sounds like "pie-in-the-sky" to someone who has lived long enough to see the truth in Jesus' statement that the poor will always be with us -- sometimes in spite of my (our) best efforts and sometimes because of my (our) indifference.

Even if hunger can't be ended in their town in a handful of years (and I pray that it can be, everywhere), their goal suggests some deeper objectives that can shape their lives for years to come:

• being aware of what they are blessed with, and what others lack
• creating a way of life that includes sharing with those in need
• getting to know those who are hungry and in poverty
• raising awareness among their complacent neighbors of the needs of the poor
• learning about and advocating against the causes of as well as the results of hunger

I hope that these young people name these as goals, too, and not just as tasks and strategies to be ticked off along the way.

We're a culture that loves to set impossibly high goals and then give ourselves excuses for not meeting them. (Made your New Years' resolutions yet?) Would it surprise you to know that Google searches for the word "gym" peak sharply each December and then quickly trail off into January? And how often do people say "I don't have the resources to really make a difference about hunger," so they do...nothing.

And we in the church are not immune. Don't we set practical goals like increasing giving by 5 percent, or welcoming 20 new members, or adding seating for 200 at worship? Or we resolve to become spiritually deeper (which means..?) or to read the Bible in a year. Or (let's be honest here) just to stay open a while longer and try to keep things the same in a changing world?

With the exception of that last sentence, there's nothing wrong with such goals. But I fear we often get it backwards, using our relationship with God, our prayer, our faith as mileposts on the way to those goals, rather than the eternal journey and destination. Jesus doesn't call us to be faithful as a tactic in order to enact social change. He calls us to perceive and live a new reality...which will change the world.

Ending hunger. Filling the pews. Knowing the Bible. These are all good tactics to keep us motivated as we pursue the lifelong task of personal and social transformation. The goal of our faith remains threefold: to know Emmanuel, the God who is with us and loves us wildly; to perceive the radically upside-down kingdom that is God's dream for us; and then living as if that dream is already true (which is the only way the kingdom actually arrives).

When we do these things, the Holy Spirit can take it from there.

Love comes down

All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel’, which means, ‘God is with us.’  (See Matthew 1:18-25)

Jesus' birth is announced to Mary by the mystical appearance of an angel.  Scholars seek him out because of the appearance of a celestial phenomenon previously unseen.  Out in the fields, shepherds are roused by a host of angels singing the glad news.

But Jesus' birth is in raw circumstances.  In a bed of uncovered straw.  Out behind the inn.  Just his mother and father, and the barnyard animals.  Not only in our world, but in a place most of us would consider lowly, unworthy.  Yet this is what God plans.  I think that, if it were happening today, Jesus' birth would take place in the alley behind the bustling pub, between the dumpsters.  Or on a grate.  Or in a homeless encampment or refugee camp.

In Jesus, God is with us, in a way we cannot completely understand.  God is birthed in the world vulnerable, dependent on imperfect humans, waiting on the unfolding of years to be seen.  God could have come to us in a miraculous appearance, leaving no question that he was in charge.  Yet he chose to come, in Christ, virtually unnoticed by the world, and to live with us in the joys and trials of everyday life, so that he could point us to the new kingdom and life God offers.

God is with us.  No hoop jumping or ladder climbing required.  We don't have to get ourselves righteous, or even notice what God is doing, for him to be with us here and now.  He lives with us, so that we can be his presence for those who live around us.

How is God with you today? How do you want God to be with you?


What difference does it make to you that God is not "up there" waiting for you to climb to him, but right next to you reaching out his hands to you?

Who are you waiting for?

Luke 7:24-30

Jesus challenged the crowds that flocked to him from John the Baptist to look deeply at their motives.  Did they seek out John because they were following the crowd?  Were they expecting a spectacle, or seeking someone to show them a prosperous, problem future?  Or were they seeking a prophet?

His question resonates today.  As we toss around slogans like "Let's keep Christ in Christmas" and "Jesus is the reason for the season," Jesus still calls me to look within.  Am I just going along with the church crowd?  Do I long for a meek, mild baby who doesn't cry or ask much of me?  A savior who will bless and rescue my life as I know it?  A source of certainty I can use to anchor my life or differentiate myself from others?  A conquering king?  Or a Messiah who will suffer nails and spears and model losing my life in order to really live it?

Are you waiting for the answers to your prayers? Or the answer to the world's prayers, who calls you to be part of the solution?