The Thing About Ministry...

The thing about Campus ministry, about ministry in general, about how God works through the whole world is this…no investment fails to yield returns. Allow me to illustrate. 

Thursday night I had the chance to revisit the ministry that played a crucial role in my spiritual development, the ministry I committed a year of my life to, the place I fell in love with campus ministry. Out under the dusky sky of a surprisingly cool August evening, in the heart of Georgia Tech’s campus, I got the chance to remember what it is I’m working for. I watched (it never ceases to amaze nor encourage me) as nearly 300 people came, ate, talked, threw frisbees and footballs, laid in the grass, hugged, laughed, in one word fellowshipped under the Atlantan skyline. I observed friends who had spent a summer in different parts of the country or even the world reunited for the first time at their beloved campus home, CCF. I joked with the freshmen I worked with as an intern, in perfect paternal fashion, exagerating my emotions as I commented on “how quick they grow up.” They’re leaders in the ministry now. They came in as wide-eyed freshmen searching for a place to belong, questioning their role in this swiftly changing world, and now have found a chance to make a difference as the movers and shakers of the living organism that is Georgia Tech CCF. I stand on the periphery of the crowd, mostly watching. It’s their ministry now, not mine. And how my ex-freshmen shone! Circles of conversation formed, involving strangers and friends alike as people introduced themselves and shared their stories. Some had brought others for their first encounter with CCF. More were making those first-timers feel welcome, and honestly, it brought me back. Back to my freshman year and my early days at CCF. 

I was brought to CCF by one of my earliest friends at Georgia Tech, Stevie Hale. He invited me one thursday night to drop my soccer game in the middle of the quad, clean up a little bit, and go encounter what would eventually become my home away from home. It began a friendship that would span my entire college career, and beyond. But that’s beside the point. There were others with me that fine thursday evening, including one whose name was Jeff. 

And it was Jeff who I was thinking of in the summer air six year later when I was reminded of the power of the body of Christ. Jeff lived on my hall freshman year. He played soccer on our hall intramural team, and when we weren’t playing real soccer, we were probably trying to best each other on the virtual pitch of our Playstation’s FIFA 03′. He was a kind hearted bear of a boy and we got along well. In the summer before his Junior year at Tech he met Michelle and fell deeply in love with her. In fact he fell so in love with her that he accelerated his graduation date, and did the unthinkable so that he could marry her sooner: he graduated in three years!! They were married shortly after in Mexico. He enthusiastically invited the entire ministry to his wedding, forgetting the impoverished status of most college students. They moved to Ohio to start their live together, but kept in touch with their friends back in Atlanta.

Its a rainy Monday morning in Rome when I get the news. Michelle, Jeff’s Michelle, had been involved in a car wreck and had gone home to see Jesus, leaving her beloved husband behind in this life. My heart broke for the tragedy of death, for another reminder in a long line of them, of our world’s falleness, and the death that ensues. It broke for my friend Jeff and for the separation of loved ones from each other by death, that great void between us and those that have gone ahead, between Creation and God after the fall. And I take a minute to thank God for the redemption of Jesus and the knowledge that Jeff and Michelle will see each other again in a world absent death. And I thank God for places like CCF that share that love with people who search for hope in a world that can seem dark and hopeless. 

And that’s what I mean by no investment is wasted. It was probably offhand that whoever brought Jeff to CCF did so. A friendly but innocuous invitation to a living body of believers and seekers. It wasn’t offered with the the knowledge of its life altering or life saving consequences. For you see, when Michelle died, Jeff called his friend and old campus minister Rick. They talked, they cried, and amidst the stories of their love and the tears for lost futures, Jeff made one thing clear. If it weren’t for CCF, he said, “I don’t think I would make it through this.” God uses our offhanded invitations and words of encouragement. Tiny actions land on fertile soil and sprout yielding blossoming fruits that reveal God’s love to our world, as it happened with my friend Jeff. 

On Thursday, as I watched the student interact, I remembered my friend Jeff and I wondered, who of these students will have loved ones die, who will encounter tragedy that seemingly has no explanation and will turn to their brother and sisters in Christ for the love given by the holy spirit, that will carry them through the hard times and keep them in touch with a God who loves them deeply, and whose heart breaks along with theirs at the way things are right now. God uses us to reveal Him in this world. Campus Ministry is like that, a place to be shone that God is real and moving, and most of all that he loves us in our darkest moments. Thank God for that. My prayers go out to my friend as he longs for the time when he will be reunited with his wife, as well as his Lord and Savior and they will all dance for joy. Amen.

How Loud?

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? and Who will go for us?" and I said "Here I am Lord, send me."

The God of Love and Tsunamis

            "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son..." to die for every man, woman, and child who ever lived, that all might not die, like we knew we would when we disobeyed God, but be reunited with God and His eternity. Isn't that essentially how it goes? So why, after all of that effort can't God dig down a little deeper and come up with an addendum to that verse. A little amendment that might read something like, "God then loved the world enough not to send Hurricanes to wreck homes and Tsunamis to destroy lives all around the world, and everyone lived happily ever after. Amen." With an all powerful God out there loving us enough to send his Son to die, it really begs the question: What exactly is God's role in the natural disasters that periodically wreck the lives of our brothers and sisters around the globe? Is it His inevitable judgment on the evil and immoral of the world? Has he just had it up to here with all those heathens who keep shamelessly living in the Sin of un-American poverty and bondage to the powers and principalities of this world? I suspect that it is not.

            I think in order to best understand how we can reconcile the notion of a loving God who can "number the hairs on our heads" and tells us that he values us above life itself, with the inarguable evidence that there are terrible things that happen in this world for which no human could ever be held responsible, we must start at the beginning. We must look at how humanity, indeed all of creation, got where it is today. And so, turn with me if you would to Genesis chapter 3. Christian or not, its likely you know this story. It speaks of the first man and first woman ever in the world, who were told by a God who loved them to stay away from something and it didn't take them long to decide they new better, and against all good judgment, took and ate. This one choice signifies for all of mankind an act of rebellion against their creator and sets off a chain of events that takes the rest of the Bible to resolve. And it happens in the first 5 or so pages (depending on the size of the print in your Bible, and whether you have those uber cute Sunday school lessons scattered throughout). From that point on it is traditionally understood that the actions of our first two fallen heroes resonated through all of creation and separated God, in his perfection, from his beloved and now sullied creation. Adam and Eve ate of the fruit, and Sin came into the world, giving birth to death in all of us. Romans 8 offers us a stirring image of the terrible effects Sin has had on all of creation. It says this starting with verse 19:

"The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. 22We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time."

It is fairly clear from Paul's inspired words that our actions affect, have affected, and will continue to affect more than just ourselves and our eternal destinations.             With this, we should really revisit our initial question. Who is to blame for natural disasters? Where does the buck stop? And it seems clear, according to scripture that we are to blame. And I don't mean "we" as in "them." Not we as in the parts of humanity that fail to keep the Ten Commandments posted on their lawns, fail to have sex only within the confines of marriage, and fail to pay their taxes accurately. I mean "we" as in every single one of us. God doesn't give us the option of separating out into teams of those who deserve destruction and those who don't. Because, the truth of the story of Adam and Eve doesn't hinge on its status as absolute fact or old wives tale. The truth is that whether you think Adam and Eve did it before you, we all have come to a crossroads where we knew what we should do, and chose to do the opposite. And we all do it repeatedly. That is the truth of Adam and Eve's story, regardless of where you stand with regards to its factuality. And the rest of the Old Testament tells the story of how God set about making things right. He didn't do it over night. And it wasn't always pretty. But scattered throughout is God's promise of a solution. An eventual end to all the death and destruction that began the day we rebelled. And that solution is Jesus.

            When it all comes down to it then, our question should not be where to place the blame, for it’s clear it rests with us. Instead we should ask, if we claim to be under the banner of Christ, what our role in natural disasters should be. It certainly should not be to sit behind our pretty Macbooks and paint God as a murderous villain who has it out for all those fornicators, idolaters, and sinners who haven't bought a study Bible and a Jesus fish for their car. We are those murderous villains. It would be dangerous for our own spiritual well being to slip into the fantasy that somehow coming to believe that Jesus came to save us from sin somehow delivers us from its consequences on this earth. The fantasy that our special knowledge guarantees us health, wealth, and safety from the unsavory characters on the other side of the tracks. Jesus tells us in Matthew's gospel that "In this world we will have trouble." Job was righteous and disaster struck. And the God who loved the world enough to send his son is certainly as heartbroken over the shattered lives left in the wake of natural disasters as we ought to be.

            And that’s really the crux of the matter. Scripturally speaking God isn’t often concerned with justifying why the world works the way it does. He says he loves us and if we ask him why he does things this way or that way, he simply responds as he did with Job, “where were you when I created the world?” The false comforters of Job should be evidence enough that God does what God does even to those who think they’re keeping to the rules. At no point does Jesus call his disciples to sit up on high horses and explain away the world’s tragedy as poetic justice for its transgressions. When the disciples ask Jesus who sinned to cause a man to be born blind in John 9 he does not tell them it was pay back for using the Lord’s name in vain or cussing out his next door neighbor, he says “this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.” And then he heals him, setting a fantastic example for how we should answer the world when tragedy strikes. Not with sanctimony across oceans, borders, or wireless hotspots, but with a set of gloves to pick up, a shoulder to cry on, and a sympathetic ear that gives the voices of the victims a welcome home. Our call as Christians who believe in a loving God is to follow Christ’s example and bring light into darkness, life into death. And in so doing bring a bit of heaven into the hell of a fallen world. I for one will leave the judgment to a God who sees us for who we all truly are, and loves us all the same. And then believe that as my heart breaks along with my brothers who have had all they own wiped out, so is God’s heart breaking at how things are. He has allowed us to help make things right. We would be wise follow his lead. Anything else would end in folly.

 

Thou Shalt Not Take the Lord's Name in Vain

Remember P.E. class? Remember the sweaty uniforms that were worn and re-worn for weeks before any of them saw the depths of a washing machine? The colors may vary, the locations may as well, but there is one thing that every single P.E. class across our great nation has in common: that unspoken hierarchy of athletic prowess that exercises absolute influence over the daily ritual of “picking teams.” I remember it probably all the more clearly as a consistent and proud member of the “picked last in gym class” club of which so many of us have been card carrying members at some point in our lives. In an age of equal opportunity and political correctness, no process defied the ideals of modern society with quite so much audacious flair as that of picking teams. The old adage that “everybody is somebody” was swiftly drained of truth when you found yourself under the scrutiny of the team captain. Social Darwinism and the survival of the fittest reigned in the place of equal opportunity and, if nowhere else in the world, here there was no shame in working your way systematically down the ladder of ability until every shred of dignity of those picked last was whittled away by the pitying gazes of those already selected.

            There were some, however, who never suffered such injustice. They were the Hercules and Achilles of their own generation. Athletes with such boundless skill that, regardless of sport, they were the guaranteed saviors of their team. With these sinewy gods of bats and balls on your side, victory was certain, and glory for each team member assured. The coin tosses were never about who would pick first, oh no, they were an appeal to the fates for the temporary invocation of their heroics on behalf of your faction. They came in many shapes and many sizes but all were united by their ability to hit homeruns at every bat, score goals with their eyes closed, drag multiple would be tacklers into the endzone, and dodge balls while hog tied. They were your proverbial Ace-in-the-hole.

            It was as much in the selection of those first picks as it was in the specific rules of the game that most contention was found. While every boy loves to watch the mighty ducks, glory road, and Rocky, the disillusioning reality of true athletics is a lesson learned early at the hands of middle school P.E. class. Just as much as it is true that victory with the best players on your team is assured, the converse is as well. We learn from a very early age the seeming importance of victory over others as well as the sting of failure that comes from not quite measuring up to the competition. And while we found ourselves then as well as now consoled by the famous platitudes of our elders that it “isn’t whether you win or lose, but now you play the game,” all of our actions speak of a different law…that second place is just the first loser.

            Constrained to sports and games, and within reason, there isn’t necessarily too much wrong with this attitude. After all, games were created to give us a healthy venue for our shared competitive natures. Yet as with numerous other things, our tendency is to allow things to spread beyond their boundaries, and so find ourselves living in a culture where everything is a competition, everything can be failed or passed, and it all comes down to who you have on your team that determines your status as winner…or absolute failure.

            I’m sure you’ve figured out where I’m going. Ah sports metaphors. But this problem moves beyond sports metaphors. With the gospel’s expressed purpose to unite all the world under the loving banner of God and his son, we, his church, are guilty of endlessly and creatively finding new ways to pick teams, and race to invoke God on their side, establishing them inarguably on the side of right. And it has fractured the body of Christ.

            God saw this coming and addressed this problem thousands of years ago, around the time he was telling the wandering Hebrews not to kill each other, worship idols, not to spoil the Sabbath, envy their neighbors…etc. He slid one in there, towards the top that has come to mean something far too trivial to have earned at spot at number three: “Thou Shalt Not Take the Lord’s Name in Vain.” And while we’ve been dutifully worshipping only God, melting our idols into gold bricks for currency, making sure not to murder anyone, we’ve gone ahead and sworn off swearing. Fecal matter is a “bowel movement”, “poo”, or if we’re feeling really edgy and want to walk right up to the precipice…”crap”. An ass is a donkey, but it’d probably be better if we just said “donkey,” and OMG for the love of the man upstairs stop saying Oh my God!

            If you were God and you wanted to say ten and only ten things to mankind, would the third thing on your mind be to remind everyone to talk pretty…and if you get all the way down then I guess don’t kill, cheat on your spouse, lie, or steal? I suspect there is more going on here.  Which brings me back to the whole idea of invoking God for our side of an argument. This is kind of a sticky subject because of that ever present post-modern danger…relativism. What I am NOT saying is that there isn’t a “right” side. I’m saying that we are far too concerned with making sure that the side that we like is the side of right. We determine our views and then claim God to it instead of allowing our love for God and his work on earth to be the tie that binds us together in spite of our denominational, political, or social alliances. I’m afraid that our concern with being right (we picked the right religion, we live in the right country, we have the right laws) has overshadowed our concern with our fellow man. For too long the approach to our muslim brothers has been “God says we’re right and you’re wrong and he wants us to shoot at you until you understand.” For too long our approach to homosexuals has been “we’re living right and you’re living wrong and God wants us to prove it by denying you rights that others enjoy.”

            Election years are the worst. Then we find people on the left and on the right of our political arena invoking God as a political entity. During the 2004 election sermons pervaded through the Bible belt that it was God’s will for us to support George W. Bush and the conservative agenda. Jesus Votes Republican stickers abounded on numbers of gas guzzling SUVs and sporty convertibles that defied reason. Dubya prayed in public and on TV invoking God to his cause and convincing thousands if not millions of well-meaning Christians to vote for him claiming they’d take a president who prays over one who doesn’t (regardless of his policies or platforms). The Bible had some characters who were notorious for public prayer and Jesus had something to say about them. It wasn’t “pray out in the open for all to see and you will be guaranteed to be a superb president," to be sure.

            Its not that the left has done much better. For they are just as guilty of invoking God for their own gain. What I want is a church that is cognizant of the truth that God transcends our petty differences. A church that realizes God doesn’t fit into a two party system that inevitably pits a set of good and bad ideas against another set of good and bad ideas. Our job in election years, in fact our job all years, is not to win debates with clever use of logic and a well played “God card,” it is to be Jesus to our culture’s “women at the well” and shine the love of their father on to them. The conviction, the judgement, the vengeance for past sins, all have been claimed by God as his sole domain. Our charge is simple. The weekly benediction at my church goes like this: “Go be the hands and feet of Jesus.” Jesus himself put it like this: If you love me, feed my sheep. And hopefully, if all goes according to plan (and haven’t we learned that when God’s involved it does) then maybe one day we will learn that we are, at the end of the day, all on the same team anyway.

Too good to be true...

You know the phrase. You’ve probably heard it when optimistically telling your friends about some new free deal you discovered online. “Dude, all you have to do is sign up for this website and they send you a free X-box 360 and three i-phones in the mail!” Pills promise weight loss while subsisting entirely on a diet of Filet Mignon and Biscuits with gravy. Websites promise to make you rich with a couple of hours of work a week taking surveys. We are inundated by it from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep, and when our hairbrained schemes fail to deliver as the bright-eyed testimonies promised, we instinctively fall back to our parents’ parents’ wisdom. If it sounds to good to be true, you can rest assured…it is.
Some of us, of course are slower learners than others. I’d put myself at the slower end of the percentile. You see I was in college and still placing my hope in things that would not deliver. It was a warm spring day that I met the smooth talking salesmen who spoke dollar signs into my youthful ears. He presented this fully functional business model that involved me simply convincing other people to buy into the model and them convincing others to buy into it under them. I remember clearly him saying something along the lines of “this is not a pyramid scheme, it’s a legitimate business opportunity.” Lets see, I convince people to sell under me and they do the same to people under them. If we draw this out in graphical form, I have to admit to my present self that it roughly creates the shape of a triangle, or pyramid if you’d rather. Sometimes I want to go back and hang out with past me and show him the business end of my backhand. But past me had the world ahead of him, and according to this salesman, I could graduate from Tech and immediately retire. Retire from what, I’m not exactly certain, but that is beside the point. I was going to be independently wealthy and spend my days either saving Africans from disease or snow skiing out of my Chalet in Aspen. I paid my money up front and got my sweet “starter kit” in the mail consisting of various types of nameless, logo-less toiletries that looked like something thrown together in a seedy meth lab. I thought these products would sell themselves! And here I sit five years later, writing in my blog from the comfort of my yacht with its satellite wireless internet connectivity somewhere just off the cost of St. Martin, sipping on a Pina Colada, and telling all of you people, Pyramid schemes work! Oh if only…

Everyone, at one point or another has a similar experience to which they can relate. I am here accusing the world off being a cruel teacher, its lesson sometimes slow in the learning but merciless in its retribution: Don’t trust to hope, unless you love being letdown. I’m reminded of a promotional poster for New Zealand on the show Flight of the Conchords. “New Zealand: Don’t expect too much, you will love it.” Don’t we all share that sentiment, maybe not about New Zealand, but about everything else?

There’s a problem though. You see, I claim to believe in a God who would send his son to die in order to save me from my own shortcomings. I claim this God loves me and everyone in the world despite the innumerable times each one of us has forsaken his will for our own aims. A God who will forgive me for doing wrong not one time, or seven times, but seventy times seven times, and more if I go over that quota. I assert that I believe that the Bible is a true revelation of who God is and how he works in this world. And if you read the Bible to find God’s character, you’ll read a story of a people who constantly fail, and do it with such creative and epic flair that any idiot would think they were beyond redemption. At least any idiot who knows that things are always too good to be true. What’s more, this same Bible not only shows a God that will send his son and allow those he’s trying to save to do the killing, it also says that this God wants to give his people things. Wants to restore goodness to the world. It says there’s still echoes of Eden in this world, echoes of how things were meant to be, and God wants those echoes to resound in our lives.

That means I have a little re-learning to do. It sounds too good to be true that there would be a God who would work through our painful shortcomings to redeem the world, yet I say it is true. Irrevocably true. That means these good things in my life that I think I don’t deserve. These things that, deep down inside I suspect are just more set-ups for lessons about life’s cruelty, are in fact revelations of the best things God has to offer. I have to learn that a God who loves me will necessarily also want the best for me, want me to be joyful. Do I mean he’ll give me everything I want? Not exactly. I should rather say he’ll give me everything I truly want, which includes some things I don’t know I want and excludes others that I think I do. It could be stated like this: with respects to God and his creation, the wisdom should be if it seems too good to be true, there is hope that its actually too good not to be. Everything with God is absolutely good, good at its best, and as it turns out everything of God is also absolutely true. Truth at its truest. If you do the math here, you get the formula: that which is best in this world is also truest.

Consequently, when I find myself doubting that God really wants to give me good things I have to remind myself to trust him. Or when I find myself feeling beyond redemption, I have to remind myself to trust him. God proved with Christ that nothing is too bad to be good, and things aren’t too good to be true, sometimes, they’re too good not to be.

Wait

My guilty conscience leads me to confess this. I have been guilty of that most heinous of Christmas crimes. I have, when all in the house is quiet, when a tiny creak in the floor would shatter the silence like brick through a window, snuck into my parents closet with mischief in mind. I have, as they snored, dreaming of their angelic children growing up to cure cancer and save the rainforest, devilishly rummaged through their hidden stash of goodies meant for me. They had things planned for me that I would love, come Christmas Day, but I didn’t want to love it on Christmas day. I wanted to love it now! Or more accurately I wanted to love it now and on Christmas day, as if having my cake and eating it too had ever been possible in the world. I was tired of waiting. Looking back I don’t think it was even about the presents. As with so many things, the issue wasn’t the real issue. What I wanted was represented for me by those presents. I wanted Christma, and the world be damned, I wanted it now! It was as if the meaning of those nights spent singing carols of anticipation around the lit candles of advent had been completely lost on me. I wanted Christmas without advent. I’d probably want Easter without lent, and maybe I’d go ahead and just have God skip the millennia of a fallen world and have him fix it all in a day. Wouldn’t everything be beautiful if there was no need for waiting, and in turn, preparation, and as a result growth.

Waiting.

There is a holiness in waiting. It started with God, waiting until “the fullness of time” to send his son to reconcile himself to the people who had betrayed him. Who had turned their back on him. He waited, with things not right in the world for only God knows how long. He waited when he could have fixed everything right then. And in so much as God can feel hurt, as God’s heart can be broken, he lived with it and waited. So needless to say there is biblical precedence for waiting. Jesus too waited, spending time as a helpless infant and a rambunctious youth. Close to thirty years before the reason he had been sent could begin to take shape, to be formed into completion from the multitude of potential that had, until that point, been building and growing, like a water balloon about to burst. And the Jews got pretty good at waiting themselves. They waited as slaves in Egypt. They were delivered and God had them wait another 40 years in the desert wilderness before they were allowed into the promised land. They waited from the time of Abraham until the birth of Jesus for the messiah that would deliver them permanently out of the trouble they seemed to constantly be caught in. And it wasn’t easy. And not all of them could do it. Some grew tired of waiting and turned to less fulfilling things. Some looked at the fruit that was forming in their lives and grabbed it with both hands, biting in to what was not yet ripe. And missed what could have been because the time was not right. Perhaps they thought the time was then. Or, more likely, they thought that what they were waiting for would never come. Their hope and faith failed them and they gave out with a last gasp and let go. I expect that they had taken it on the chin one too many times to remember the occasions when God had helped them win. One too many blows to the head, and punch-drunk, they abandoned the chase.

I can sympathize excruciatingly with these poor souls. With all poor souls who have found themselves unable to wait for their lives to reach their potential. Friends who have decided to take matters into their own hands. I’ve had friends marry girls not right for them out of fear of permanent solitude. I’ve known too many give in to the quiet darkness and silence of loneliness and say to themselves, “this will never end unless I make it end.” I have thought these things. I have been afraid of these things. You see, nobody wants to wait for what will never come. Nobody wants to admire the view of all those things passing him by if he can’t remain convinced that this isn’t his stop. That his destination will have all of those things and more. It’s like we’re all on a train to somewhere and we can only see out the windows to the side. We can see the people smiling. They must be happy getting off here. But its not where I’m supposed to get off. And that is difficult. The train ride gets longer, it gets dark outside, I can’t see where I’m going, and I can’t see where I’m at. And I can only hear myself in the silence. “What if is this ride never stops?” “What if where you’re going is worse than where you’ve been?” These voices have overtaken many, and they could overtake me. In their subtle, constant pull on my heart. But they are not of God. After all, God waited. And he’s made promises, and if there’s any one to be trusted to keep their promises, its God.

Now, grown up, or at least more so I can appreciate advent like I did not as a child. Advent is a wonderful gift from God. The blessing of advent is this: that at no other time in the world is the beauty of waiting and preparation as evident. The joy of Christmas is realized on Christmas day, but it is only a piece of the entire beautiful picture of a hearts cry for rightness, a God who would have things put right, and the time it takes to paint the picture of God’s glory in this world as only the artist himself would paint it. As the prophet Diana Ross put it: You can’t hurry love. You’ll just have to wait. And wait I will for God to complete the picture of my life as he intends it. And when my life’s Christmas arrives, I’ll be ready and the joy will be perfect and complete. Amen.