Clique or Community

People that are like me are the easiest to be around.  They tend to reinforce my biases and assumptions because they share most of them.  People that are different than me are harder to be around because they challenge my assumptions.  They have a different angle on life.  My view broadens when I am around people that don't think like me, that look at things from a different angle, that have different strengths than I do.   I am not talking about issues of truth, those are fixed and provide the necessary bond of unity.  But I am talking about cultural preferences, strengths, gifts, etc.

Phillip Yancey sees these two paths as the difference between a club and community.  He says, "we often surround ourselves with the people we most want to live with, thus forming a club or clique, not a community.  Anyone can form a club; it takes grace, shared vision, and hard work to form a community."*  While genuine community does take much more grace and effort, it brings with it so much more benefit.  Cliquishness shrivels the soul and promotes self-righteousness in the boundary markers of the clique.  Community stretches the soul and challenges our assumptions about how right we are in so many of our preferences and judgments.  

You see this play out in marriage.  Two people come together who are different from each other.  They are a man and a woman, and so they deal with things and think about things differently.  They also come from different families and so they bring certain biases and assumptions about what is normal to the relationship.  These are good things.  As the years increase, and the couple faces different issues together, they learn that the other does not always share their deeply help ideas and preferences.  They can either come to despise those differences, and slowly drift apart; or they can come to delight in them and slowly stretch each other to a higher vista.  This new and higher vista is then passed on to the children who will likely one day take it into their own marriages and go through the same process.  Where it is delighted in and embraced, this results in a process of generational maturity.

You also see it play out in the church.  There is a trend to build clique churches around certain shared cultural assumptions.  This is easier up front, but it will result in a narrow church over time.  As people reinforce one anothers' shared assumptions, those will grow deeper into the life of the community.  The way the "inside" of the community will increasingly be defined by default will include the shared cultural assumptions of the culture the group is built around.  Those who don't hold those cultural assumptions will increasingly be seen as "outsiders."  The more this happens, the more the group becomes rooted in the kind of legalism that led Peter to withdraw from the Gentiles during lunch.  Paul didn't think this was a small issue, but got in his face to show him that his conduct was out of step with the gospel.  Why?  Because part of the good news of the gospel is that the boundary of the community is Christ alone.  That is it.  If you are in Christ by faith you are a full member of his body, cultural differences and all.  And the Bible tells us that God purposely builds this community from different types of members, all united by one Spirit.  If everyone were an eye, how would the body hear?  If everyone were a foot, how would the body think? 

So this is a challenge to value the beauty of the other.  This takes humility and grace.  It takes time for understanding.  It takes commitment to be together.  And it has glorious results. 

*Quoted in Total Truth by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, 111

Shame Off You

There is an enemy who wants you to live in shame.  There is an enemy who delights in your shame.  His goal is to keep you chained up with it.

And he is clever.  So he doesn't tell you plainly this is what he is doing.  He just offers you ways of escape that he knows will keep you chained to it.

Shame comes from your conscience.  You know what is right and wrong.  When you do wrong, you feel it.  Sometimes you can't sleep because of it.  Sometimes old wrongs come back up into your mind to plague you.  You feel like you can't be totally honest with anyone about who you are and what you have done.  You worry that someone will find out.

Your enemy offers ways out: 

1. Justify your wrongs.  Adopt arguments that what you know is wrong really isn't.  Then feel enlightened that you have silenced that silly conscience with the shining light of reason.  Just don't examine those reasons too closely, and keep doing those things if you can.  You are truly a champion, you don't really do bad things, you are a defender of rights.  When that conscience speaks up in a quiet moment,  just stuff it back down, surely it is wrong. 

2. Glory in your shame.  Shout it from the rooftops and from hashtags.  Announce to yourself and the world that you are proud of what your conscience smites you for.  That will silence that silly conscience.  That will stuff that bothersome shame.  Surely feelings of shame are part of some warped collective consciousness, or some antiquated thing you were taught.  Just don't think about that too long.  Don't entertain other possibilities.  Don't imagine your conscience is a divine guide to goodness.  Why would a divine guide to goodness ever want you to feel bad about yourself.  Only people who do bad things should feel bad about it.  Surely I don't do bad things.

These are dead ends.  They will not silence your conscience.  They will not cover your shame.  They will keep you locked down in it until the day you die and go to answer to the one who gave you your conscience.  At best they will blunt the voice of your conscience so that it becomes merely a faint nagging feeling in the back of your heart.  But there is a Friend who wants you to be free from shame.  There is a Friend who delights in removing your shame forever and giving you the glorious gift of a truly clean conscience.  

He offers a way out.

1. An atoning sacrifice.  A true Friend came and acknowledged the depth of your wrongdoing and shame.  He looked into the darkest corners of your heart, knew what you have done and desired, and then he looked you in the face and told you he loves you.  And then he asked you to see how much he loves you, and he took the blame for all your wrongdoing on himself.  He took all your shame like a coat and put it on and went out into public with it where he was mocked, spit on, and killed for what you had done.  He took it all into the grave, left it there, and rose to new life.

2. Faith and repentance.  He says this is yours if you believe him.  Your shame and guilt can be gone, and your conscience can be delightfully clean, as clean as if you had never done a thing wrong.  You don't have to slay your conscience in order to silence the shame.  The shame has been owned and worn, punished, and is dead.  We come to experience this through repentance from our wrongdoing.  This means admitting it, all the way down to the bottom, throwing away all the excuses and self-justifications for why it really wasn't that bad in your circumstances, and calling evil what it is, even when you find it in yourself.  And then you turn away from it, telling God you hate it and don't want it anymore, and asking for his help to be free from it.  Faith and repentance:  Admit your wrongs, tell God sorry, believe that he loves you still, and that Jesus wore all your shame and there is none left for you, and then walk in freedom and gladness.

This is not a dead end.  This is the path to eternal life and joy.  Jesus will cover your shame and give you a clean conscience.  Repent and believe, and be saved.

Panegyris

Last weekend we went to a folk music festival in the forest.
As we walked up a dirt trail through the trees outside of Pagosa Springs we were greeted by a lively doe and her spotted fawn.  They saw us from a distance and ran over to the hill beside us to watch us climb the trail.  It was a good welcome.  

We knew we were getting close when we could hear the picking of stringed instruments and singing.  The trail ended in a large camp full of smiling people sitting around campfires playing music together.  We made our way to the entrance tent.  The lists were checked and the bracelets put on our right arms by a smiling helper in an almost formal welcome ceremony.

We wandered through the open glade towards the sound of the main music stage, moving through another narrow passage where we were asked to leave behind any drinks from the outside, only to be presented freely with clean water on the inside.  Once inside we saw a smiling friend, his eyes wide with excitement as he showed us around.  Dancing over here, shelter over there, kids playing freely down here, good beer under that tent, food up there.

The music was amazing, fun, and full of energy.  The highlight was the Oh Hellos, who had nine people on stage with band members running and jumping around throughout their long set.  Music from a fiddle complemented an accordion, a banjo mixed with two drum kits, and all the varied instruments blended together to lift us all out of our chairs dancing.  The raucous set ended with the whole band lined up humming the tune of Come Thou Fount in beautiful, haunting harmony.  The whole experience echoed for me the climax of the Silver Chair when Jill finally came out of the underworld right into the middle of an all-night Narnian forest festival under the moon, during the first snow, with music and dancing and a complex game of throwing perfectly timed snowballs between dancers.

Being part of this festival reminded me of the unique beauty of festal joy.  It is what we Christians aim for Sunday after Sunday in what could be called Resurrection-Fest; where we gather to sing, worship, hear about, and eat and drink in celebration of the death of death in the death of Christ, and life into the ages through his resurrection.  And then with all of this still ringing in my heart, I happened to read that we "have come to mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel."  Mysteriously, in Christ, we are already there with the angels in panegyris, in "festal gathering."  Soon all this darkness will be shaken loose and we will open our eyes and find ourselves, like Jill, in the middle of the greatest festival the world has ever known.  We will have dumped out our tepid water, and will be welcomed to drink deeply from the river of life forever.  There everlasting joy will crown our heads in the presence of the Chief Musician.

*Image credit: Folk West, http://www.folkwest.com/#!home/zoom/mainPage/i01mcc

Excitement, Butterflies, and Church Membership

I get excited about stuff.  The world is full of things to be interested in and excited about.  This summer I got excited about teaching one of my sons to play the guitar, and that excitement carried us through several weeks of spontaneous lessons.  Maybe you are like me in that getting excited about things is great for awhile, but it doesn't seem to have sustaining power.  Now I am trying to figure out how to schedule time to do lessons regularly, to commit to it, so that even on weeks when neither of us are excited about it, we do it anyway.  I know that in the long run, this will lead to the most reward for him in playing the guitar.  I have years and years of deep enjoyment from the guitar that came from excitement turning into commitment, leading to enjoyment and more excitement.

Marriage is this way too.  Romantic love is one of the most exciting things in the world, and it can sustain lots of activity, time, and devotion for a long time.  But even the butterflies of romantic love fly away some mornings, some winters.  Marriage is a way for the excitement to lead to commitment that lays the groundwork for years of deep enjoyment and more excitement.

A Christian's relationship with a church is this way too.  It is fun to get excited about a certain ministry, a certain type of preaching or mission, a certain group of people, or whatever.  And that excitement is good.  And that excitement is meant to lead to commitment to that local church, even when it doesn't feel exciting, even when it gets costly at times.  This is why we practice what we call church membership at Gospel Church.  To our culture it can feel overly formal and strange.  It can feel like an inauthentic element of true community.  But we believe that a solid, formal commitment to a specific community of people will in the long run lead to a deeper level of true community and enjoyment in that community.  Membership is an act of giving yourself to a community of Christians.  It is an act of committing to stay through seasons when the excitement wanes, to push through difficulties with people so that in the long run true community, deep connection, and seasons of great excitment sprout up.  If excitement is a butterfly, commitment is building the butterfly a home to return to year after year.

Our Houses Smell

Have you ever noticed how most peoples' homes have a distinct smell?  You smell it when you walk in the door, and often on their clothes when you see them around.  Sometimes it can even come back home on something you loaned to them.  The strange thing is, I don't think my home has a distinct smell.  I mean, I suspect that it must, but I don't notice one.  Maybe when I come home from vacation I notice a faint something when I first open the door, but it goes away quickly.  Isn't it strange that we can be oblivious to something so intimately associated with us, when it is so obvious to everyone else?

We are the same way about sin.  Your sins are obvious to me, but I can be strikingly oblivious to my own.  And I suspect it works the same way for you.  Part of it is that we are so accustomed to our own sins that we have stopped noticing them.  Another part of it surely has to do with pride.  I think I have good reasons for my sins; I have come up with justifications for why they are actually virtues.  I'm not sinfully angry, I am righteously indignant.  I'm not proud, I am just honest about my many strengths.  I am not envious, I just see clearly how wrong everyone else is with their money.  I am not self-righteous, I just like to talk about my goodness to set a good example.  I am not lazy, I just know how to rest better than others.  I am not lustful, I just admire beauty in all forms.  I am not a drunkard, I just like to have a good time.  I am not an idolater, I just embrace all spiritual paths.  You get the idea, you know how it works.

And even though our sins are obvious to each other, we don't like to point them out.  We tell ourselves it's because we are nice.  Maybe we have tried hinting at them, but the person was too thick to listen.  After all, our wall of justifications is pretty thick.  We have been working on it for quite some time. 

At times we have gone beyond hinting and pointed out the sins of others quite plainly.  Often this happens because we are in close proximity with them, and their sins began to encroach on our happiness.  Something had to be done.  This happens in marriage, doesn't it?  Eventually we get quite bold in pointing out the sins of our spouse that bother us the most.  This is a painful process, but with lots of grace and love it can help us become better people.  The problem is that when we do it this way, we are not acting in love for the other person, we are acting primarily in our own self-interest.  Your sin bothers me, so I am going to tell you about it.  If we really want to hurt the person we won't tell them at all, we will tell others.  We might couch it as a "prayer request" or a "concern."

But there is a better way.
It begins with each of us admitting to God, to ourselves, and to each other that we need to hear about our sin; that we tend to be blind to our own deepest and most persistent faults.  It begins with admitting that we need others to point out our sin to us so that we can see it, confess it, and fight against it.  And the best way for this to happen is not when you have had enough of me and can't stand it anymore.  It best done because you love me and you know that my sin is my great enemy.

This will happen more as I welcome it from you, and you from me.  It will happen when we humbly invite each other in to point out our sin in love.  No one does that.  But we can. 

We will become increasingly open to this as we grow to delight in getting rid of sin and growing in love.  We will become open to this as we come to believe that continuing in sin is worse than the shame we experience from having it exposed.  And we will be enabled to face that shame the more we believe that Jesus' death is sufficient to take all our guilt and shame away.  It will happen as we learn to rest more fully in our justification in Jesus' death on the cross alone.  The more we believe that his death fully justifies us for every sin, all the way down to the bottom, the more we will be ready to kick down our walls of self-justification and stop trying to excuse our own crap.  The more we believe and rest in him, the more free we will feel to not only let our sin be exposed, but to ask for it to be.

This kind of thing is best invited instead of pushed.  The best way to start down this path is by asking others to confront us about our sin.  What might God do if we started trying this?  

The Only Thing I Really Have to Say

All these posts, and I really only have one thing to say. God created this world as a paradise of life and joy in the presence of his divine glory.  We decimated that paradise by refusing to be thankful to him or to love him and others like we know we should. We made ourselves his enemies. But God has looked on the sadness, brokenness, evil, and hopelessness of our hearts and our world, and has determined to fix it in his grace. The Divine Jesus entered into our world and took our evil and suffering onto himself, and died in our place. Leaving our condemned sin in the grave, he rose from the dead, beginning a new world of love and joy and glorious reconciliation with God. The old, beautiful, broken world is rotting, and soon he will do away with it and everyone clinging to it, so that he can make everything new again. He welcomes us all to be reborn into this new world of love. This happens as we see this beauty, believe it, and turn loose of our rebellion to embrace Jesus.

Classroom and Community

I picked up this idea somewhere listening to Jeff Vanderstilt.

"Teaching them all that I have commanded you," can be done in a classroom.
But that is not what Jesus said.
"Teaching them to observe all that I commanded you," has to be done in life together.

I am confident that classroom teaching is valuable.
I am also confident it is not enough.

God, let us love you in word and in deed together, with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength.