Valuing the Ordinary.

One Sunday morning I had a realization: I could sleep in. My dad was a pastor, so growing up I never had the choice of whether or not to go. If church happened on Christmas day (one of many reasons pastor’s kids have angst) my brother and I would be there – even if every other kid in our community was at home opening presents.

I was in college now, and lying in bed I was fully aware of the choice before me – not fully aware of all the implications of sleeping in I’m sure, just simply that I had the freedom to do so. I am an American, after all.

I made a judgment call, and hit the snooze button – that way, if I wanted to go I would just be ten minutes late. That move really helped bypass the potential guilt of it. I wasn’t officially saying I wasn’t going – ya know?

When worshipping with a community is just an obligation, one more thing to check off a spiritual list, it practically begs people to hit snooze – or if you go to a night service, to stay a little long at a Sunday happy hour.

We want the Sunday service to be awesome – find me a mega church that doesn’t have an awesome band, an awesome speaker, or a faith healer who specializes in instant weight loss. The more uplifting, or challenging, or emotional, or evangelistic: the more likely we are to show up – if that’s all that a Christian might look for in a worship gathering.

Elijah has a moment towards the end of his career (as the most awesome prophet to ever live) where God tells him to stand on a mountain and wait for Him to pass by. This is a huge deal – God is going to show up, and he tells Elijah to be there. Here’s what happens:

““Go out and stand before me on the mountain,” the Lord told him. And as Elijah stood there, the Lord passed by, and a mighty windstorm hit the mountain. It was such a terrible blast that the rocks were torn loose, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake there was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire there was the sound of a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.”

Elijah was a man who had commanded the rain to stop, causing a drought for 3 years. He had called down fire from heaven, been fed by ravens for a year in the wilderness, and he had brought a person back to life. Here’s a dude who should expect a big show when he goes to meet with God. But when God shows up, he does so in a gentle whisper. Some theologians translate this phrase as the sound of silence.

Fire and windstorms don’t happen all that often, but silence is easy to come by. Many an industry is devoted to avoiding it. Try sitting in silence for 5 minutes without anything to listen to, think about, or stare at – it will be rough.

God showed up as silence to tell Elijah something: I am in the mundane and the ordinary. If you only come looking for me in windstorms, fire, and an awesome worship band, you will miss me.

Worshipping with a community on a Sunday morning is more often average than extraordinary. The message is rarely hand picked for you, and the worship leader’s guitar may go out of tune. But, something happens in us when we decide that, despite the lackluster, we are going to stay present in the mundane for the God we are looking for.

- Andrew

Interesting.

These are the words that are most common on this blog - I like what we talk about ;)

Andrew

When God is missing.

I remember a time where God was missing. One day He was there, the next He wasn’t showing up in the usual ways. Over time, I began to get more and more distressed. I started to recreate situations where God had showed up before, and nothing happened. I prayed, I tithed, I served – I did everything I knew to do and God was still missing. I begged God to show up.

I wondered if God was punishing me for something I had done – maybe He was giving me the silent treatment. I wondered if there was some lesson that God wanted me to learn – was this my hint? I scanned my memory furiously, hoping for a clue in to God’s absence. Somehow, I must not have been living up to what He desired.

Or, maybe this was all just part of His plan for me. Maybe my suffering would be the tool he used to make events turn out the way He wanted them to. It got to the point where I began to wish I could just get to heaven already – God doesn’t ignore you there. God’s silence lasted for almost two years.

What I didn’t know then was that my experience has been shared by people throughout the ages; many more spiritual than I – Mother Teresa even. I don’t know why, but I take comfort in that. It has been called all sorts of things, like “The Dark Night of the Soul”, “Spiritual Desert”, “The Cloud of Unknowing”….

Richard Foster has this to say about it,

“I want you to know that to be faced with the “withering winds of God’s hiddenness” does not mean that God is displeased with you, or that you are insensitive to the work of God’s Spirit, or that you have committed some horrendous offense against heaven, or that there is something wrong with you, or anything. Darkness is a definite experience of [the spiritual life]. It is to be expected, even embraced.”

I’m glad to hear what he says the Dark Night of the Soul is not. I’m even glad to hear that I should expect it to happen to me – and then I get to ‘embraced’. Embracing time where God is absent is hard to wrap my head around, if there is no purpose to it.

But, I don’t think the Dark Night of the Soul is without purpose.

There are some things that God can only say through His silence. Silence weans me off loving the God I am prone to make in my image. God’s silence asks the forming question, “Is it [blank] that you love, or is it Me?” Insert the blank with even the most noble and righteous of things – morning quiet times, serving the poor, prayer, Bible studies…anything can be that blank if it replaces God for the central place.

But, I don’t think God is some giant narcissist in the sky, demanding my constant attention. God brings me back to Him for my sake – because God is the only one who satisfies. Morning quiet times, serving the poor, prayer, Bible studies… none of these are what I need – they only bring me to Him.

And, more good news, during this time of silence, God hasn’t paused the good work He has promised to do in us. George Macdonald paints the picture this way, and I can’t help but keep coming back to it. This is why I embrace God’s silence:

“To give us the spiritual gift we desire, God may have to begin far back in our spirit, in regions unknown to us, and do much work that we can only be aware of in the results…In the gulf of our unknown being God works behind our consciousness. With his holy influence, with his own presence…He may be approaching our consciousness from behind, coming forward through regions of our darkness into our light, long before we begin to be aware that He is answering our request – has answered it, and is visiting his child.”

I imagine God working deep within me, on levels and in places I am not yet conscious of. They are so deep down, so in need of healing, that I can’t hear God speak as He normally does – but as those points of redemption are brought closer to the surface, then I can expect healing. And, I can expect the God I was waiting for.

Audio.

So I gave my sermon this Sunday, and was really blessed by how supportive my community was as I spoke. I have put a link to the audio file if you are interested in listening ;)

Andrew


http://public.me.com/nonopz

Sermonizing

Tomorrow is my first sermon - that brings a mix of excitement and nervousness. Some people suggest you spend an hour working on a sermon for every minute you would be in front of the group, which would be about 45... but I think I put in twenty hours in stead! I have read and reread the passage and my sermon so many times that I think it is becoming a negative thing.

I am hoping that I can keep the attitude that this sermon is an opportunity to participate in truth with my community. At moments, I get scared wondering: what if they don't like it? Or me? I rob the passage of truth when it becomes about me. If I seek to gain from this, I will end up taking instead. What a sacred and profound thing a preacher finds him/herself doing. May the wonder of it never be lost on me.

And now, for the finishing touches before bed. I'll post a link to the podcast when I have one!

Thank you for helping make this possible.

Andrew

Desire.

One of the first misconceptions I can remember regarding God had to do with desire. Somehow, I had come to believe that God was happiest with me when there was nothing I wanted too strongly. And, if there was something I wanted, I was sure God would give me the opposite or take away the opportunity. Sadly, I don’t think I am the only person who experienced this.

I remember worriedly avoiding prayers for girlfriends or good grades or a cool vacation; I was convinced that if I voiced anything that I wanted badly, God would do the exact opposite to “teach me a lesson”. I would try and calm myself down about things that excited me because I didn’t want God to find out.

In college I went to a Christian organization on campus, and the leader of the group believed this same thing – with a little twist. He always said that God worked best when people were out of their comfort zone. So, all of the leaders in the group were working in less than obvious fits. The nerdy, shy leader was doing outreach in the wildest dorm on campus. The music leader couldn’t sing. The bubbly chearleaderish girl was leading Bible studies in the astrophysics department. And it was all summed up in the leader himself: a driven, programmatic, success-oriented man who was leading a college group at a college full of hippies. The only sport we took seriously was ultimate Frisbee.

But, what I’m coming to recognize is that God is in the business of satisfying desires after all. Listen to this Psalm of David:

¹ Praise the LORD, O my soul;
all my inmost being, praise his holy name.

² Praise the LORD, O my soul,
and forget not all his benefits-

³ who forgives all your sins
and heals all your diseases,

⁴ who redeems your life from the pit
and crowns you with love and compassion,

⁵ who satisfies your desires with good things
so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's. (Psalm 103)

If David was telling the truth, God delights in our desires. Our desires are what make us human, and our desires ultimately lead us to God. Share the things that excite you in prayer, because God wants to participate with you in it. Do the things you are passionate about, because God wants to use them. Thomas Merton put it this way:

“But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers you can determine the identity of any person. The better the answer he has, the more of a person he is.”

I think if we’re honest, many of our desires don’t look God friendly. Desires for sex, money, and power sure don’t. But, rather than running from the less than pretty desires, pretending you don’t have them, or hiding them from God, take some time to look a few layers deeper.

The reason God satisfies desires is because, ultimately, all desires lead back to Him – even desires for sex, money, power, and all the rest. The truth of this will be a few layers beneath the desire to give the bird to that driver on the freeway – but it’s worth exploring if you also desire God. So, what do you desire?

-Andrew

Postmodernism.

Here is a snippet I came across this afternoon that I thought I'd share:

"Postmodernism has been used by so many people to describe diferent things that we may be excused for wondering if anyone can really define it at all. My own working definition of it is that the modern age is over - the age in which we believed in the power of the state, or the academy, or the church to bring out the best in us. In the age just past, nationalism has brought us Hitler, science has brought us the atom bomb, and religion has brought us some really awful television programming, not to mention apartheid or the civil war in Northern Ireland. Humanity has turned out to be hard to perfect, and the old structures we relied on to do so have let us down.

The postmodern age is an age of disillusionment with once revered authorities, which is not an entirely bad thing. Does anyone want to live life under illusion? No, not really. It is best for illusions to be revealed for what they are. Meanwhile, disillusioned people respond in all sorts of ways. Some abandon the search for meaning altogether, while others hunt for deeper and more reliable sources of it. Some campaign for a return to the values of the past, while others invest themselves in new visions of the future." - Barbara Brown Taylor

Well said. And how simply it heads from here to the church - many of the people I am in contact with from day to day share these sentiments. The church is an institution that has hurt them. The church is a place speaking a dead language. The church is missing the point. Hopefully, we have an opportunity at Evergreen to catch people before they abandon the search for meaning - I am sure there is something deep, beautiful, and meaningful for us postmoderns in the person of Jesus. If God can redeem the tragedy of an innocent man on a cross, He can redeem our disillusionment.

-Andrew