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“Stuck Between The Can and The Will”

December 16, 2011

WORDS FROM W.W. December 15, 2011

A walk with Jesus is a walk of faith.
Plain and simple! Faith is what moves us on when it would be rationale to stop. Faith is at the center of who we are as Christians. It takes faith to believe that what the Word of truth is really true.
But there is a point in our faith walk where it is easy to get stuck. It’s a point that is as consuming as Mississippi mud. It’s the place where we have faith that God can do something, but we’re not sure if he will do something. It’s an uncomfortable place for people of faith to be in, because we pride ourselves on believing. Stories of extreme faith fill our Chicken Soup for the Soul books, and daily guides. It’s the residence of the doubt-filled.
There’s an interesting story in Mark 9 where Jesus encounters a man whose son is possessed by an evil spirit. The father has grieved the pain of his son’s life for years. The boy is continually in the midst of situations that can bring him harm, plus he can’t speak. The father comes to Jesus and tells Jesus that he has already brought his son to the disciples, but they can’t seem to handle the situation. Jesus replies “O unbelieving generation…” (Mark 9:19)
His disciples were struggling with the “can” and the “will.” They were at an impasse. I picture it being like a group of government bureaucrats shrugging their shoulders and saying “We’re sorry! But this is a situation that falls outside our parameters. You might check with the disciples of John the Baptist. They may be able to help you.”
The scripture says that when the spirit saw Jesus, it immediately threw the boy into a convulsion. (Mark 9:20). At the end of verse 22 the father says to Jesus, “…if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.”
And Jesus replies, “If you can? Everything is possible for him who believes.”
The disciples are over in the corner trying to not notice, and doing a lot of rubbing of their foreheads. The father then replies to Jesus, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”
Those words resonate with me. I believe, but sometimes my unbelief tips the scales.
We may feel guilty in those moments and those points of “faith deserts” in our lives.
But the story doesn’t end there! After Jesus has cast out the spirit and restored the son, he is in a private location with his disciples and they ask him the tough question- the question that gets attached to the “stuck point of faith.”
“Why couldn’t we drive it out?”
And Jesus replies in Mark 9:29, “This kind can come out only by prayer.”
It seems that prayer is an essential bridge builder over the gulf of doubt. How much prayer? I don’t know. I don’t read in scripture that there’s a minimum…or a maximum. It’s a vessel that slowly moves us, or, if you will, un-sticks us, from the “can” to the “will.”
Perhaps sometimes we don’t put faith in our praying.

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“Short Candles”

December 8, 2011

WORDS FROM W.W. December 7, 2011

Our church is splurging this year. We’re getting new candles for the Christmas Eve service! The personal kind that each person gets to light and hold as we close our gathering that night singing Christmas carols by candlelight.
There may be some who think that we’ve gone crazy with our free spirited spending. After all, we’re almost $5,000 behind in where our budget says our financial giving year-to-date should be! But…we went for it!
The reason for our carefree spending trend is that the candles we’ve been using…for the past 15 years…or maybe twenty…are getting to look more like cigarette butts than candles. We can now fit almost a thousand “candle butts” into the box that originally held 250.
We could have held out for a couple more years. After all, only a couple of people got their fingers burned last year! (That was a sarcastic remark, in case you missed it!)
The thing is I hadn’t noticed! It took someone else who had kind of a burnt smell rising from his fingertips to point out the fact that the candles had “miniaturized.”
When you don’t see something until Christmas Eve each year it’s easy to lose sight of what others see clearly.
It seems an appropriate statement for those of us who frequent church. We get entrenched in “what has always been” and have a hard time seeing over top of the deepening ruts. It’s like answering the question “When did the candle get short?” It didn’t suddenly happen. It gradually went from new to used to very used to useless.
In church we have an assortment of things that go from relevant to irrelevant, but it usually happens over time…and we frequently never notice.
And, sad as it is, there are a number of people in our churches who would rather be irrelevant and comfortable than relevant and challenged.
It may very well be that I’m have a few people show up on Christmas Eve and ask where the old candles are. If that’s the case I’ll look to see if they have burn marks on their fingers.

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Half Full or Half Empty?

December 2, 2011

WORDS FROM W.W. December 2

The church is the mechanism in our time that has the most potential to make a difference; and the church is also the most difficult organization to make a difference.
That statement may seem like a contradiction in terms, and yet it hits at the core problem…and possibility of the Body of Christ.
The church is comprised of flawed and fallen people who are trying to stand back up. We seek to help people in finding Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. We seek to help people who are constantly falling getting back on their feet, and walking on with our Savior.
And yet because of our flawed fallenness, we quite often knock people back down who have started walking again. The Body of Christ can quite often be called the Bruised despite Christ.
Grace gets see-sawed with a grinch. Love gets paired up with hate. Peace is put in an uneasy relationship with unrest.
I wish it were not true, but it is. Behind the beauty are some warts. Crouched behind faith is unbelief.
And so we come together as the people of God and talk one minute about the blessings of the Lord, and then we talk about the problems of the people in the very next statement. We thank God for how we see his hand at work in one situation, and groan about our imperfections in the next one.
Is the glass half full or half empty? The answer is “both and.” This very moment I my thoughts might be consumed with the impossibilities of the situation, the difficulties of having to work with people; and then in the next moment I’m sensing the hand of God working in our midst.
It’s a glass of water that has tidal waves in it, at one moment rising to the brim and then at the next exposing the deep bottom.
And that is the church, fluctuating in effectiveness and emptyness; experiencing the moving of the Spirit, and then the barrenness of a valley.
The difference-making and the difficult nature of the church makes the journeying together complex and confusing, but, as time goes on, it also clearly becomes more and more vital.
Walk on! Walk together! Walk with grace!

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“Here and There”

November 23, 2011

WORDS FROM W.W. November 23, 2011

I find myself thinking about the “not yet” quite often these days.
When the car loan gets paid off!
The next vacation away!
Easter…even though it’s yet to be Christmas!
The next wedding of one of our children…even though no one is even engaged!
The next book I will read…even though I’m only half-way through the 500 page book I’m presently reading!
What’s for dinner…even though I’m staring at my breakfast yogurt and fruit (OK! That’s a very valid one!)
A good night’s sleep… even though I just woke up from the last one!

Planning ahead is encouraged, but I seem to have a hard time living in the present. The Bible instructs us to keep “the here” and “the there” both in perspective. Jesus warns of consequences if we are so focused on the wants of the present (Luke 12:13-34), that we can’t think about the things of the Kingdom of God. On the other hand, in promoting the quality of being prepared, Solomon wrote in Proverbs 21:20 “In the house of the wise are stores of choice food and oil, but a foolish man devours all he has.”
Finding the balance is a slow walk of humble awareness.
How can I be wholly present in the moment, while envisioning the possibilities and dreams of the future? How can I be here, while walking towards “there?”
Sometimes it seems to be an easy escape to think about “there.” The “here” is filled with so many problems that there seems to be a great sense of peace to think about what might be. If my present is dysfunctional, let me populate my thoughts with a world that is perfectly functional.
On the other hand, recent years has seen several examples played out where the futures of our children’s children have been mortgaged for the sake of the present.
The people of God struggle with the “here and there” as well. If too much attention is placed on what will be, people feel not cared for in the present; but if we focus so much on the present we will never get to the what will be.
Personally, I will come to a Thanksgiving gathering tomorrow delighted to spend time with spouse, kids, and grandkids (and perhaps even the cat!), but aware that sometime in the midst of the festivities I will begin to think about Sunday sermon preparation, tasks to perform next week, and Buddy Basketball being just six weeks away. Perhaps I’ll begin our Thanksgiving meal with a prayer that says, “O Lord, thank you for your provision, and thank you for these moments. Help me, Lord, to be present in the here! Amen!

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The Balanced Radical

November 10, 2011

WORDS FROM W.W. November 10, 2011

Here in Colorado Springs in the midst of one of the main tourist attractions, Garden of the Gods, there is a huge boulder that looks like it has been turned upside down and balanced on its tip. Thus the name of the attraction, “Balanced Rock.”
Balanced Rock looks like it could go either way at any moment. One notices that there are some tourist who walk a wide circle around it because of having just a little fear of being smushed! And Balanced Rock has continued to stay balanced for a long, long time.
Walking with Jesus is meant to be a radical experience in many ways. All one needs to do is read the gospel stories of the encounters Jesus had with people from various livelihoods, and listen to the words that Jesus said to pick up on the fact that being a “Jesus follower” is transforming. For instance, when Jesus tells the parable of the sheep and goats and he talks about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, giving water to the thirsty, visiting the prisoners, and taking care of the sick, he makes the point that what was done for the least was done for him. (Matthew 25:31-46) Of course, he goes the other direction in the same parable and talks about the fact that what was not done for the least person was also not done for him. It’s a rather uncomfortable scenario. I guess you could say rather radical.
There’s also a section of Scripture in Luke 11 called “The Six Woes.” To summarize the six woes Jesus makes the point that the religious folk known as the Pharisees were all about outward appearances, but spiritually vacant on the inside. They put on a good show, but there was no substance and root to it.
I’ve been reading an interesting book entitled Good News in Exile: Three Pastors Offer a Hopeful Vision for the Church. In the book the three pastors (Martin Copenhaver, Anthony Ropinson, and William Willimon), drawing from their experiences serving various congregations and college chapels, are pushing for what could best to titled “A Balanced Radical Faith.” They push for their readers to see how often the church has tilted to one side or the other, and therefore, the participants of the church have also usually tilted one way or the other. In many congregations there is the push and emphasis to get involved in fighting hungry, abuse, homelessness, and violence. In other congregations there is the emphasis to have a multitude of Bible studies, home groups, prayer gatherings, and worship services.
Neither is necessarily bad. It’s good to feed the hungry. It seems that Jesus made a pretty big deal out of that. It’s also good to study the Word, and discuss the depth of our faith and beliefs.
A balanced radical is one who is coming more and more to an understanding, a conviction, that Jesus is calling for followers who want to go deeper in their spiritual lives, and also desire to serve more sacrificially.
It’s like “Balanced Rock.” Many people will make a wide circle around it, because it seems so strange. And yet, balanced radicals are who Jesus is calling us to be. In a sense, our world is turned upside down in service to the King of Kings. Not many of us risk it, because it looks like our world could topple over.
And here’s the thing, a balanced radical realizes that he/she never arrives at a point of settledness, because the winds of life are always causing adjustments. In other words, the balanced radical comes to an understanding that it is only faith in Jesus that is holding him up.

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The Ache

November 1, 2011

WORDS FROM W.W. November 1, 2011

It’s a tough time!
Almost all of us have been through them. They take different forms- loss of jobs, fractured relationships, serious illness, mounting expenses, loss of life. The past couple of weeks have been a tough dark tunnel for me. Two people I’ve known for a long time passed away. My mom’s health has slipped at a quickening pace. And then there was the bronchitis issue!
On top of that there are a number of life stressing situations that people of my congregation are dealing with that have no easy answers.
It produces “the ache”, that internal moan that is void of peace, and the antonym of comfort. The ache intensifies and suppresses joy. It is unsettling and lonely. The anxiety of the ache is connected to the uncertainty of its time table. How long will it be within me? Will I wake up one morning and discover that its gone? Will it lessen in intensity? Will I come to a place that I no longer recover the pain, but consider it as a part of my existence, kind of like aching knees in the morning and a tooth that always throbs?
What comfort I receive in the midst of this is knowing that so much of the Bible is written by those who were experiencing the ache? So many of the Psalms are about trials, tribulations, discouragement, and fear. Ecclesiastes has the reoccurring theme of meaninglessness. Lamentations I not a title for a happy book. The prophets were led to write and prophesy about the ache of God, as he encountered the various betrayals and apathy of his people. Paul writes about the thorn in his side, the ache in his life.
It is good to know that those who have been close to God all down through history have dealt with the ache. There’s a sense of journeying together with those who have gone before, and yet there is also that sense of “deadness” that is a part of me.
The ache of “the dessert” causes us to draw closer to God or drift further away. It is an experience that we can not stay the same as a result of.
And so I seek a deep intimacy in which the embrace of God will be sensed in more profound ways. I pray the words of the psalmist: “O Lord, the God who saves me, day and night I cry out to you. May my prayer come before you; turn your ear to my cry. For my soul is full of trouble and my life draws near the grave. I am counted among those who go down to the pit; I am like a man without strength.” (Psalm 88:1-3)
If David could pray that, and yet at another time pray, “I love you, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge. He is my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.” (Psalm 18:1-2)
It gives me hope.

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PS2 Upgrading

October 11, 2011

WORDS FROM W.W. October 11, 2011

About a year and a half ago Kevin, my son-in-law, passed on to me his PlayStation 2 game system. A while before that Kevin had upgraded to the PS3. He blew the dust off of his old system and handed it down to me. (Point of Instruction: Old people hand down to younger people things like cars, dining room tables, books, and jewelry. Younger people hand down things that deal with technology to older folks.)
When I got the PS2 I tuned it on once within the first day, got tired of driving off the road in the racing game I was playing, and then put the game system away for…the next 18 months. Last week I got it back out again! Back in August the Liberty High School Girl’s basketball team that I help coach had a garage sale and I bought about 30 PS2 games for a dollar a piece.
Let the gaming begin!
What I realized however was that I was missing some kind of cord. I don’t know what happened to it. Perhaps it disappeared out of obsoleteness. Whatever it was I needed that cord…whatever it was!
I went to Best Buy first. I noticed they were stocked heavily in PS3 gear and games, but for some reason there was no PS2 section.
Lizi went with me to Game Stop. Not knowing what cord it was that I needed, I just took the whole game system into the store with me. (I noticed that it was about this time that Lizi started keeping her distance from me. What’s up with that?) The young lady behind the counter was very pleasant, although the encounter felt like a scene out of “Extreme Pawn Shop.” I asked her if they had PS2 cords, and she looked relieved. I think she was expecting me to ask her how much she would give me for my game system.
She muttered something like “Don’t see many of these any more.”, as she went looking for the missing cord.
The needed cable cost $15, and then she tried to sell me on the idea of being a member of the Frequent Customer Rewards program. I declined by saying, “Miss, let me be honest with you. I’ve had this game system for a year and a half and I’ve turned it on once.” She smiled. I was close to asking if they had a discount for AARP members, but withstood the urge.
I exited the store with game system and the needed cord. Lizi waited a few seconds before following me.
When I got home I put in one of my new old heavily-discounted garage sale games into the console and started gaming. Clumsy would be complimentary! The control has so much more than the old Atari game stick we used in 1980. It’s almost like a keyboard! I jumped off a cliff numerous times!
It’s going to take some effort and a lot of time, but I’ll master it. Before you know it I’ll be less than ten years “game system irrelevant.”
On the positive, the games are cheap, and nobody wants to play the PS2. You don’t have to share what nobody wants!
The PS3 seems to imposing, so overwhelming, so…current. I can’t imagine being able to play it! Maybe in a few years!

BRIDGE THOUGHT: As I look at my PS2 and how antiquated it is, it occurs to me that such a scenario often happens in the church as well. When I first started in ministry I heard it said quite often that the church was twenty years behind the times. That is still true in many ways. The difficulty is that change is happening so rapidly today that twenty years in the late seventies is equivalent to about fifty years today. That is, what is current becomes obsolete much quicker. The scariness is that when we think we have become more current we’re already dealing with what was. Does this mean that the church must mirror culture that much more closely? Ministry is not about being hip, but it is about maintaining the ability to speak. When what is current for us is twenty years dated we risk giving the message “Come here when you want to deal with your past, not with your future?”

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Rewriting History and Other Things

September 28, 2011

WORDS FROM W.W. September 28, 2011

One
of my reading projects for the past couple of months has been reading James
McPherson’s Battle Cry For Freedom, his extensive 900 page
masterpiece about the Civil War. It’s a fascinating work that exposes some
situations about the Civil War that I never knew. For instance there was the
Fugitive Slave Law, which gave a slaveholder the right to go into any state that
his runaway slave had escaped to, and claim his slave as property. In 1842, when
a slaveholder from Maryland sent a man into Pennsylvania to bring back his
escaped slave, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that a slaveholder’s right to his
property overrode any contrary state legislation. In another situation,
President Millard Fillmore threatened to send federal troops into Boston to help
retrieve a couple that had run away from their Georgia owner and been in Boston
for two years.

I was
also amazed to find out that Jefferson Davis, when he was a U.S. Senator, led an
effort to purchase Cuba from Spain to try to make it into another southern
slaveholding state. There was an effort afoot to increase the number of states
where slavery would be legal. In doing so it could tip the voting balance in
Congress. On the other hand, there were apprehensions expressed about any
possible new state being added. These concerns were from pro-slavery Senators as
well as Senators who were abolitionists.

I
don’t remember a lot of the things that McPherson writes about being taught in
my U.S. History class my junior year of high school. Perhaps I was sleeping.
After all, class was right after lunch and our teacher’s voice was infected with
“extreme monotone syndrome!”

As we
look back at that era from today there is a tendency to summarize the situation
by saying the South wanted slavery and the North was against it. It makes it
easy to remember, but misses much of the history.

I am
constantly amazed today at how people frame their explanation of a problem on
the basis of what will make them look right. People, and talk radio hosts
especially, rewrite and reconstruct current events not so much to look right and
knowledgeable, but rather to make the other side look out-of-touch and
insensitive.

But
you see, I also think we dangerously “rewrite Scripture” to say what we desire
it to say. It seems there is a tension these days between “culture” and “the
written Word.” It is foolish to think that we are able to look at Scripture
without any filtered culture lens–and it is also foolish to allow culture to
dictate what it is that Scripture is saying.

In
essence, we allow our culture to be the double-edged sword that determines who
is going to get cut and where. Our leaning is to figure out what I believe and
then find Scripture to support it, or interpret Scripture so that what I believe
does support it.

There
are many things in Scripture that people cannot come to agreement about, and I
don’t think we should expect that. The community of Christ should expect to have
interesting and diverse dialogue. As long as there are Yankee and Red Sox fans
in the church there will be debate on God’s opinion about pin stripes.

However, it seems that editing the Word and rewriting it
has gained new momentum in the midst of polarized people.

To
that I wonder, although I won’t be around to discover the answer, how history a
generation from now will summarize the Christian movement of the present?

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“PRAYER ROOKIE”

September 22, 2011

WORDS FROM W.W. September 22, 2011

God has been impressing upon me in recent weeks the urgency of prayer, and also the opportunity of prayer. The more I’m learning the more I feel like a prayer rookie.
It’s similar to my football coaching days. I’m in my seventh year of coaching middle school football. I was the school’s basketball coach (Still am for 10 years now!), and the Athletic Director cornered me in a coffee shop one summer morning and asked me to coach football. I played football through my freshman year of high school, but things were not complex back in those days. Now as the head coach overseeing the program for the 7th grade and 8th grade I feel like such a rookie. Football terminology is like New Testament Greek. It requires a lot of coffee to help in the comprehension.
That’s how prayer has been seeming to me lately. I’ve prayed for almost my entire life, but it seems like God has been teaching an old dog new tricks. I’m having a lot of “a-ha moments”, but I’m also having a lot of “I just don’t get it” moments.
Prayer is a part of the relationship. It’s like the steam coming off a hot cup of coffee. It’s a part of the experience. After a while the steam becomes less, but then the server comes around for a “warm-up.” That’s a picture of the heat and coolness of our prayer. We need continual warm-ups.
So much of prayer emerges out of the wrong motives. I’m aware that I have a tendency to pressure God with my own agenda, not that God can actually feel pressured. It’s like I’m my own lobbying group peppering him with my needs and initiatives.
“God, open the wallets and purses of the people to take care of this budget deficit.”
“God, grow our church!” (Notice the word “our!”)
“God, the lawn needs rain. It’s losing it’s greenness!”
“God, get that nagging person off my back!”

And so I’m learning that I often approach prayer with a wrong mindset, wrong questions, and wrong motives. I’m a rookie trying to understand.
On the other hand I’m not sure if there is such a thing as a “prayer chiseled-veteran.”

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Facebook, Netflix, and Others With God Complexes

September 21, 2011

WORDS FROM W.W. September 21, 2011

It is a common occurrence in our culture that when something gets popular it teeters on the edge of unreasonable. The escalator has been taken to the “exalted floor” of the mall. Quite often many of us get taken with it, or perhaps a better way of saying it in hindsight is “got taken.”
New ideas spark new ways of seeing the world, but sometimes the new ideas come to a point where they believe that are the new deities, above questioning and inspection.
Netflix got that idea a few months ago when they raised their monthly membership by up to 60%. In other words, they were saying “We’re awesome! You can’t live without us! Here’s what you’re going to pay, so deal with it!” When my trash company raises it’s fees by $5.00 every three months I can deal with it. When milk prices jump a quarter I can deal with it. But when a “lay around time” activity thinks my life will not be complete unless I chalk up more money so they can increase their corporate profits, I jump off the escalator.
Just to clarify, I’ve never been a member of Netflix, but the tactics and entitlement seem to be filtering down into our cultural systems more and more.
There’s a difference between leading new initiatives and bleeding constituents.
Like the $62 a seat Nuggets tickets I bought at a silent auction last year for $25 a piece, and then I discover that our seats are at a certain place in the arena where the shot clock on our end of the court obscured our ability to see the basket at the other end of the court. I think I’ll just cough up $10 and go to the Air Force game. Believe me, there are no obstructed view seats there.
Or that mega social media giant “Facebook”, which recently made changes because they just wanted to, and people can’t get along without them…so there! Facebook now determines, in a social networking kind of way, who your most important friends are, and who aren’t that necessary. I don’t understand it, but, of course, I don;t understand Farmville either. When it comes to social networking I’m more like Abraham, “going not knowing.”
I remember hearing a presentation by Tony Campolo years ago about the principalities and powers that oppress people and destroy lives. Campolo at that time was focused on oppressive governmental systems and Gulf-Western, which raised sugar cane in the Dominican Republic. I remember him talking about an orphanage his organization was running in Haiti because of horrific poverty situations that caused me to weep. He would quote Colossians 2:14-15: “…having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he (Christ) took it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” The Cross of Christ showed the tendencies of our culture for what it is- drunk with power, ADD in their concern for the have-nots, selectively tuned-in to the problems of their customer base.
Could it be that the principalities and powers of today are those institutions, corporations, and even individuals who think the world revolves around them; and that you and me can’t survive without them?
Let’s bring it home to the church! As a community of faith I hope we never enter that area called “entitled.” That is, a church that is an expression of the “living Christ” isn’t beyond reach. It never thinks that the community is privileged to have us, even though the community is better because of what we’re about. It’s not a people of privilege, but rather a people privileged to live out the call.
As a people of faith there needs to be an owning up, an acknowledgment that even though we are the community of the living Christ, people have been living without us.
Netflix learned that they weren’t as high and mighty and a necessity as they thought they were. Facebook may find out the same thing (Anybody remember “MySpace”?) The church, the messengers of hope for the one true God, will be more and more vital as it proclaims who the one true God is!

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