Embracing the Left and the Right and Everything Else

Indulge me for a moment. You (whoever you are) are walking down a street and you encounter a group of men and women who seem to be connected with each other – arguing, laughing, talking thoughtful, playing a bit. And somewhat towards the front is a man who for all appearances looks about like any local walking that street.

Except for his eyes when he looks at you. In the movies, when they portray Jesus, his eyes tend to have this ghostly, other-worldly appearance as if an alien creature had possessed that Jewish body. Which is not at all how I picture Jesus. What I think of when I encounter him walking that dusty street is someone who, with very human eyes, has the ability to peer right inside you in a way that is both full of love and acceptance and full of anticipation that you will rise above whatever you are not now rising above, if only as he enables you to do so.

I heard it again somewhere today: "Hate the sin and love the sinner" – and in that order. Not what I read of Jesus in the Gospels. Can't even proof text that one. What I see in Jesus' eyes is just "love you, son" (I happen to be male). And as I experience that amazing and unprecedented love, I so much want to shed all that is not right and become as much like him as I humanly can. And when I find I can't, I beg him to help, heal, forgive, transform me, whatever it takes. And he does, bit by careful bit, while all along he hugs me like there is no letting go.

Indulge me a little more. Watch Jesus walk past you now. See how he encounters others on that street – a bent-over elderly woman, a rough-looking Roman soldier, a lonely prostitute, a conniving businessman, a crying child. Does he change each time he meets someone new and different? Or do those piercing eyes convey the same message every time?

Having read through those gospels so many times I cannot even make a guess, I am confident his message is as consistent as the most predictable thing you can conceive of in our present human reality. Even more so.

Not everyone responds to Jesus the same way. Some avert their eyes. Some lock eyes for a moment and then forcibly look away or down, out of fear or shame or disdain. Some respond like a long lost puppy. But his gaze and its message doesn't change.

So why do my eyes change, dependent as they are on who they see? Why do I avoid eye contact with some, fear this one or write off that one? Why do I look for the ones I think deserve my attention or who will be most receptive or who are most like me? Or who will most like
me? Why do I preface loving the sinner with "hating the sin" as if it were a clarifying clause?

Because I want to make sure everyone understands that God hates sin? Of course God does. But is that what defines God? Nope. Otherwise we'd all be charcoal briquettes. So, is "hate the sin" even a close second clause to "love the sinner"? Nope, again (with apologies to Miss Miller, my ninth grade English teacher).

What I see in Jesus' eyes is simply "Follow me". That is not a command as in "you're in trouble now." That is an invitation as in "follow me and wait and see how you change and how you will transform others around you!"

So I am sitting at a table in China with a Communist official, a businessman, a teacher and a car driver. (Not a joke) And I'm thinking, how is Jesus looking at them?

So I am sitting at a table in the USA with a Democrat/government official, a Tea Party businessman, a teacher and a truck driver. (Again, not a joke) And I'm thinking, how is Jesus looking at them?

I think about my friend who pastored a church in Central America where pro-government loyalists and revolutionary Communists attended side by side. And I wonder if that is possible here in Portland? Can they do it if they avoid talk of politics? Or is politics included along with everything else in what Jesus wants them to discuss and grow together in?

I wonder about all that. Can a church survive with Communists and Tea Partiers sitting side by side in the worship service? Oh sure, as long as one of them goes to the altar – you pick which one J Or maybe they've already been (to the altar, that is) and in fact they remain a Communist and a Tea Partier even as they've met Jesus and are trying to follow him. Only they're each still working out their salvation with fear and trembling, and so haven't quite wound up seeing eye to eye on everything.

I think about all this and wonder and hope that next time I go to a worship service or encounter someone on the street, it is the eyes of Jesus which embrace me and not another. For I know another upon seeing me – despicable as I am – is inclined to shudder and chant, "I hate your sin, though of course I love you nonetheless." And somehow it would feel like anything but love gazing out at me from such eyes.

And I pray, May I have the eyes of Jesus next time I look at another.

Neighboring

The path was muddy and steep, buildings nowhere in sight, as I climbed toward what I assumed was a residence. I hesitated at the gate, eyeing barbed wire and warning signs, but only for a minute, resolute was I to fulfill my constitutional responsibility to enumerate the population. ("How noble of you," was one noncompliant nonresponder's sarcastic reply.) 

When I found the house, amid thick undergrowth and perched on the hill like a hawk seeking prey, it felt dark and empty. The door was to the back, meeting the path and the ground at the same place. Like homes in Asia, shoes neatly lined up to the side. My, how big they are, I thought, and images of "Fee, Fie, Foe, Fum" sprung to mind. 

I knocked tentatively on the door. As I waited, it dawned on me that the door was fairly new and substantial, a stock purchase from Home Depot. How on earth did they get this door up that path? A sneeze could blow the whole building down, all but this door and its frame. 

This house, remote as if in the Canadian Tundra, sits less than half a mile from a tired, squat apartment building crouching on the edge of one of Portland's busiest streets. Like the house in the woods, the apartments are fortressed, only with bars instead of briers. 

I wonder about community in all this, these people cut off from neighbors who have no idea who each other are. In a nearby apartment building, a tenant doesn't even know the last name of her roommate. I've discovered that age, gender, ethnicity, marital or economic status, even population density do not determine connectivity. And I wonder why two neighborhoods identical in all the externals can be either so neighborly or so reclusive. 

Community is an essential characteristic of what it means to be human. The defining sign of the fall of Adam and Eve was separation – from God, from each other, with divisiveness even creeping into the relationship between humanity and the rest of the created order. Moreover, the hallmark characteristic of the new community of faith, the people of God, as portrayed in the New Testament, is a community based on love. "This is how they will know you are my disciples," Jesus said, "that you have love one for another." (John 13:35)

We sat in a hotel lounge, this provincial government official and I, drinking tea and talking like the old friends we were. He, a member of the Communist Party, and I had worked on many projects together, but never had I been able to share my faith with him. He, mentioning some foreigners kicked out for doing "religious activity," was passing on a caution without saying as much.

I took a chance. "You know I am a Christian and so are the people in my team." 

"We know that," he replied. We talked in soft tones, feebly attempting a private conversation.

"How do you know that?" I ventured.

"By how you relate to and treat each other," he said. "And that is why we like working with you."

We'd been found out without saying a word to "them" about our faith. 

I love the story of the Good Samaritan, particularly how Jesus uses it to transform the noun "neighbor" into a verb. We do right when we neighbor other people, when we love them as we love ourselves, the way we want to be loved.

And I think about the next time I trek up that winding path. I won't say it, but I will demonstrate it by my effort. I come here to enumerate you today, not because the Founding Fathers ordained it, but because my God calls me to treat you as I wish to be treated. 

Maybe the way he wants to be loved is to be left alone. Not really. "To be left alone" really means I don't want to be bothered, troubled, be given new pain. 

I am bothered when someone treats me poorly, doesn't protect my sense of boundary, of personhood, of space. I am not bothered when someone truly loves me. Love has no barriers. At least that is what Jesus teaches me.

Now, taking someone's census isn't like taking their temperature when they are sick, but it is a sign of community, just as much as gathering the whole family for the annual picture. 

I don't think we are any more or less communal as a society than we were a generation or two or five ago. Every age has its problems with building true, biblical community. I just think that we have to learn at every turn how to build community anew and in ways that demonstrate God's love to each other.

The census will come and go. The need for neighboring each other, like serving the poor, remains with us.

Nine Minutes More

"It is true that there are certain things that libertarians believe that will seem just shocking and scandalous to most people unless we're given 10 minutes to explain ourselves." At least.

Tim Woods, a scholar at the libertarian Ludwig Von Mises Institute, is being quoted in the latest issue of Time magazine ("Rand and Ron," 7 June 2010). In response, journalist Michael Crowley writes "that's about nine minutes more than anyone in modern politics gets."

Actually, Misters Woods and Crowley, it's more than anyone gets these days. Decades ago, preachers, politicians and professors could wax and wane for an hour or two and the sermon or speech was socially acceptable. That was before TV and radio even, certainly long before sound bites and 24/7 cycles and instant messaging.

I tend to be what is called a biblical theologian rather than a systematic theologian – it would take more than 10 minutes to explain the difference. I like my theology as well as my politics anchored in a Scriptural context several thousand years long and Church Universal wide, and I don't like said Word reconstructed to fit my (or anyone's) system du jour. So I tend to bristle at what my friend George Paul Wood calls taxonomy when it comes to sorting out political (or religious) classifications. I much prefer a thorough analysis of where a person stands than a sound bite that conveniently stuffs said person in a hole for safekeeping, because people rarely stuff so conveniently.

George does have a point – to a point. But labels are not the end-all of understanding. And on this I think he would agree with me because he is a thinking Labelist. (As I wrote another thinking Facebook friend, Jack Niewold, the other day, there are two kinds of people in this world, those who categorize people and those who don't.) Don't get me wrong. Labels can be useful – and certainly Jesus did use labels, as Jack reminded me in a Facebook thread that lasted at least 10 minutes. But labels no more define a person than skin does. Which is to say, labels do work – but only to a point.

When life is going at the speed of light as it tends to do in our own day and age, who has time to think, to process, to analyze, to look at all sides of any one issue? Maybe it is better to boil it all down to two simplistic poles and let them go at each other for five minutes on Fox or MSNBC – far more entertaining than listening to a Libertarian or a Communitarian, Calvinist or Arminian or Sacramentalist actually talk out his or her ideas ad nauseum.

But this is where we miss it. Talking something out is not just for supposedly thinking people. Talking something out is a part of relating, of hanging together, of coming to understand another as more than just the sum of a few short conclusions. And some of the best relaters are those who, while they cannot put two words together, do know how to hang together.

One of the headlines in today's news cycle is that Tipper and Al Gore are calling it quits after 40 years, hardly newsworthy in my book. Except that one sound biter is saying that is an accomplishment because people live longer these days and 40 years of commitment is a long time.

Well, it sure is. And I'm barely over halfway there with my bride of 23 years. But 40 years is not all that long to really, truly understand another. I won't comment on the Gores' predicament. I only say, generally speaking, that 40 years is only when you get to the end of the beginning stage of understanding another, be it your spouse or someone on the other side of your religious or political spectrum.

If I did wear labels more easily, I might call myself a Libertarian or a Communitarian or a Calvinist or an Arminian or a Sacramentalist or an anti-Sacramentalist. But I don't wear labels very easily and it mostly has to do with not wanting someone to stop listening after one minute. Even if they don't have ten minutes, I don't want to give them the satisfaction of thinking they can move on simply because they have found a useful label for me. They are free to move on. They are not free to think they so easily understand me.

Kids’ Songs

I like essentials. They help me unload excess baggage.

I used to teach the nursery class in Vacation Bible School and Children's Church. Way back when I could bend down or sit low with those little guys. Two classics I loved to lead those kids in singing. Two of my favorite songs from when I was a kid. "Jesus loves me, this I know" and "Jesus loves the little children of the world."

You can't get more basic than that. This is the Gospel – that Jesus loves me (personal) and that Jesus loves everyone, regardless of human classification (universal).

I've blogged about this before, but it comes to mind again and again. As, for example, I read about this priest, Henry Nouwen, who encourages a father to bless his own bio son in case he dies. The son has suffered some horrible accident and is not expected to live.

Bless him, Nouwen says, by which he means, "Say good things to him. Tell him that you love him and speak to him about God." The son eventually recovers, though I've no doubt the blessing is not wasted. [Michael Ford, Wounded Prophet: A Portrait of Henri J. M. Nouwen, 151]

What does it mean to bless someone? It means to speak of or to demonstrate God's great love to that person.

We classify and clarify and cull each other's faith. We, who think we understand yet have hardly begun to fathom God's love, what do we know? We barely understand it for ourselves.

A friend challenges our small group discussion with the question of whether some sins are greater than others. I squirm. Okay, I get angry. But since I am only starting to learn how to get angry instead of stuffing it (apparently this is a skill to be learned), I merely squirm loudly to the pain (no doubt) of my friends.

Why do I not like the idea that some sins are greater than others? Perhaps there are variations and degrees of sin. Not a problem if God is judge. Besides being impartial, who can argue with the Almighty? God is going to do what God is going to do.

But I don't have to put up with people acting like God. I am not a polytheist. One God is enough for me. And I like this God who loves unconditionally. Apparently God's forgiveness is conditional – if we ask for it, if we forgive others, especially if we forgive others. But God's love is at once unconditional, eternal and universal.

I get angry because I have seen where that question of whether some sins are greater than others leads. Step 1, some sins are greater than other sins. Step 2, your sins are greater than mine. Step 3, I'm in, you're out.

Ever notice, another friend points out one day, how the fewer people who practice a certain sin the more evil it is in the eyes of others? How many people commit adultery compared with how many people feel lust? Obviously more people are guilty of lusting than of committing adultery. Which sin is looked down on by the greater number of people? The sin that fewer people commit. The sin that fewer people want to excuse. Which sin does Jesus say is greater? Hmmm, if you lust after someone, he says in Matthew 5:28, you've already committed adultery. About the same, apparently.

At times I have fellowshipped with a particular group of people not readily accepted by church or society. They are misfits in our world. I've noticed something about them. They are some of the most accepting people you will ever meet. They who have been forgiven much, love much. And they are deeply in love with Jesus, even as they struggle to realize Jesus really does love them.

He does, he really does. The Bible tells me so. And it also tells me that he really, truly does love all the children of the world – red, yellow, black and white, they are all precious in his sight. Grab that double truth about God's love, let it sink deep into your gut, let it transform your life. Let it shake up the way you relate to others. All the rest is excess baggage.

Taking Census

Above my house are the West Hills of Portland, a tumbling jumble of streets and homes defying gravity, symmetry, and social classification. One thing is certain: those who live in these homes will all someday die.

I thought about that yesterday as I knocked on a string of houses that turned out to be vacant. They were filled with things and memories, but the residents had all moved out one, three or five years ago and been placed in nursing homes, their houses remaining empty until their owners die and someone holds an estate sale to sell off all their unclaimed treasures, the cash being more desirable than the goods to whoever can lay claim to the remains.

We've been to numerous estate sales in these hills, my wife and I. Crowds line up for the 9 AM opening and enter a few at a time to peruse, select and cart off whatever seems of value. If you wait till the second day, the selection is much slimmer, but the prices are cut by half.

Many of these neighborhoods were built in the late 50s through late 70s and the original buyers have never moved on. Until now, when death comes knocking at the door. And so, ever slowly and surely, the ownership of these houses has been turning over as the old generation passes and strangers move in to stake their claim.

As an official U.S. Census Enumerator, I am sworn to confidentiality over the information I gather – names, genders, ages, and ethnicity – said data having a 72-year hold before being released. Someday some odd descendent will scour the records for the facts of their long-forgotten great-grandparent, but until then only a corporate image of the area will be revealed. Demographically the West Hills are white, with a high percentage of elderly, interspersed with young families and middling singles, all of whom appear stereotypical, but must surely each be harboring unique and fascinating tales of life.

A few warmly invite me in for tea or offer me something to eat. Occasionally someone, generally age 80 or older, wants me to linger long and talk – or just listen. Most have a formally polite, business-like, get-it-over approach to the census, aware that the Founding Fathers mandated the enumeration so that our nation could function as a representative democracy. Then there are a few who seem keen on exercising their Second Amendment rights and, with real or imaginary weapon, chase me off of their tiny kingdom, intent to remain anonymous to the world beyond.

But even with these, there are generally ways to get at the rudiments of information. Neighbors who care about their neighborhoods and those who live in them. Real estate offices. Apartment complex managers. The nosy neighbors remind me of the little old ladies in China with the official red armbands, a political token identifying a cultural tradition of maternal care far more ancient than the political system itself. The managers, I sometimes have to remind them, are under law to help me in my mission of enumerating the people of the land.

In all this sleuthing, there is a consistent pattern of humanity as steady as the rain on my window this afternoon. People are born, they live, and they die. When our kids were younger, my wife and I used to take turns reading a story to them at bedtime. Sometimes, when they were extra tired or time was especially pressing, and it was my turn, I'd give them my classic three-liner of a story:

"He was born.

"He lived.

"He died."

I don't know why it was always a "he", except that perhaps the male pronoun shortened the story by three characters. The kids learned to anticipate that tale and came to understand that in these seven words was the briefest essence of life. We are born. We live. We die.

I've had this fantasy of an idea for some time now, that I could accumulate some wealth of my own and buy one of the old estates in the area, fix it up and turn it into a museum. I'd preserve the ancient trees on the tract, cultivate a diversity of flowers and fauna, and fashion benches and chairs of wood and stone. And, permit willing, I'd turn the place into a land where the poor masses who live in the valley below could bring the ashes of their departed loved ones and spread them under their favorite shrub or flower, a place to come and linger, treasuring the only thing that carries beyond the grave – memories of a life worthily lived, or not.

In the jumble of miniature kingdoms known as Portland's West Hills, mansions rise next to crumbling cottages and vie for million dollar views with gravity-defying stilted palaces. Elderly widows land-rich and cash-poor live next to young professionals debt-rich and sense-poor and share the same street with aging managers cash-rich and relationally-poor. They are Jewish and Gentile, wealthy and broke, educated and ignorant, sophisticated and common. But they are one and all headed for the grave. And their Maker, acknowledged nor not.

And to the grave, they will take nothing, absolutely nothing that can be sold in those estate sales. They spend their whole lives amassing things to separate them from their neighbors and in the end they are no different than anyone else. They cannot stop the tide of life.

These thoughts that follow me as I knock on yet another door are not depressing. They are simply a meditation, a reminder that we are not the sum of our possessions, but we are the sum of what treasures we manage to store up in heaven, where moth and rust cannot corrupt and thieves cannot break in and steal.

 

Putting “cross-cultural” back into the Gospel

I'm working feverishly (sounds good, anyway) with my editor to get my manuscript [Night Shift: Crossing the Cultural Line for the Kingdom] publish-ready. Dave Green is great to work with, even when I don't like his assignments! Right now we are rewriting chapter 1. The beginnings of books tend to be the most difficult to flesh out. We're shifting things around and adding and subtracting great lines I've written. All part of what Dave calls the Macro editing or revision process. Anyway, here is the beginning as it looks at this moment, raw and all.

***

How essential to the Gospel is cross-cultural work? Consider this. The central message of the Good News is that God in Jesus became flesh, Immanuel, "God with us." Another way to say that is that Jesus' method was incarnational, meaning he left his own culture and became a part of ours in order to communicate God's culture of love to us. Cross-cultural ministry therefore is at the heart of the message and the method of Jesus, what we call "the Good News" or the Gospel.

What is the Good News? It is the culture of light engaging the culture of night. If darkness is merely the absence of light, the culture of light has nothing to fear the encounter.

If light is metaphor for God's reign, and darkness is the absence of or that which resists the light of God, why then do Believers abandon the night? Why do they avoid or flee people groups, nations, governments, political parties, schools, businesses, neighborhoods and neighbors for the safety and security of the light, thus sealing off these parts of humanity and those human institutions in the darkest of tombs?

There are Believers who do not fear the night, for they understand that He who sends them also empowers and shields them with His Spirit. They know their mission in this life is to cross borders into territories and cultures alienated by darkness and to penetrate the curse of the night with blessing. They do so not necessarily as known superheroes, but as heroes nonetheless, often masking their daring deeds of greatness with harmless acts of goodness. They do not give in to fear, for they know that ultimately in the Kingdom of Yahweh their God, goodness will triumph over evil, blessing will push back curse, and light will surely dispel the darkness of night.

What does it take to get it done where it is not now being done? The second two "its" in this question, referring to victorious and overcoming goodness, blessing and light, is what Stephanie Ahn Mathis calls the "2GC Mandate," the Great Commission and the Two Greatest Commandments. So to put the question more directly, What does it take to fulfill the Great Commission and the Two Greatest Commandments where they are not now being fulfilled?

For thousands of years, we as Believers have been commanded to love God with all our whole beings and to love our neighbors as ourselves, by going and making disciples of all nations. We, like Jesus, are called to bring Good News to the poor, to heal people and set them free, to proclaim what the Ancients called "the Year of Jubilee." Or to put it yet another way, we are to reach the unreached, free the oppressed, and embrace this world's misfits.

Yet after all these millennia, the task of bringing God's culture of love to the unreached, oppressed and misfits remains daunting, to say the least. I do not think our mission is more difficult than it was 100 or 500 or 1,000 years ago, but there certainly is more to it – more people to reach, more needs and kinds of needs to be met, a greater variety of challenges, and so on. Every age has its own complications, and ours definitely has its share.

We as Believers are on a mission to cross cultural lines in the night. We do so by applying biblical models to our lives and work and, in so doing, we learn how to cross cultural boundaries and creatively access out-of-the-ordinary opportunities to fulfill God's mandate that His will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

By "night" I mean serving where our work is not as visible as what we think of in traditional Christian life and ministry. Night work means working in tough times and hard places. Night work means working where people don't know or don't understand what you are doing. Night work means going where people don't want you, serving people who don't like you, and blessing people more likely to curse you in return.

Night work isn't fun, or at least it is not easy. But night work has its own unique rewards, the best of which is knowing that you are doing something very near and dear to God's own heart. Even if no one else notices, He does.

Coming to Terms with God and Life – mostly God

I turned 55 a couple weeks ago. I like this birthday. I call it the "Double Nickel."

Life has all kinds of milestones, though I'm not sure the real pivotal points in life are at those mile markers. Pivotal points, the spots in the road where the road makes sharp turns, occur more randomly – okay, according to God's design, but they sure feel random. The problem with the "designed by God" part is that then you have to decide what to do with how you feel about those events, especially the ones overflowing with trauma and pain. Maybe the pain, too, is part of God's design. But then what do you do with the pain itself – and the incommunicable feelings that come with it? If God intended the pain, are we just supposed to accept it? Do we even have an option?

Some people think you're supposed to just stuff it, your feelings. But as someone once said, manure poops out one way or another. (Okay, he didn't use the word "manure.") It is true, though, you can't just stuff feelings. And you don't even just hand them over – they are part of who you are. What you do is channel them in the right direction – instead of bashing in some wall plaster, you get involved with helping hurting people.

I figure I've been channeling feelings into causes and mission and action for a long time. Now I'm learning that channeling is not enough. What I have to do is consciously link the pain with that action, identify one with the other. I'm angry, I'm hurt, so therefore I'm going to apply healing to someone else's hurt and anger. It is as if the pain in me becomes balm for someone else and in the process, we both get better.

Does God feel pain? Does He even feel? Scripture paints Yahweh (one of the Judeo-Christian names for God) as a God who both feels and expresses emotions. So in the same way that I believe that we have intellect because we were designed by intellect (what some people call intelligent design, though I speak to ultimate cause more than to methodology here), I also believe we have feelings and emotions because we were designed by One who feels and emotes. God doesn't just have love, Scripture says – He is love.

It's a good thing. That God feels. I don't think I could handle a God who doesn't feel my pain, whose heart doesn't break when a child is bought for sex or a man beats up his wife or when a cop pulls someone over just for being black or brown. I can handle a God who punishes the wicked, however He deems it wise to do so. But I don't think I could handle a God who punished at whim (not that I'd have any say in it). I don't even think I could handle a God who condemned people to damnation and didn't provide a way of escape from that fate. People are far too complicated – who that is good hasn't done something very wrong and who that is evil hasn't done some very good things? God better be a good judge of character. Actually He also turns out to be a lavish dispenser of grace.

Some people make a distinction between a supposedly angry God of the Old Testament and a loving Jesus of the New. But I see a God who loves some extremely disobedient people in the Old and a Jesus who gets angry at hypocrisy and injustice in the New. And besides, the Jews who have only the Old Testament for their Scriptures also understand a God who lavishes love indiscriminately as well as a God who rains down wrath on hypocrisy and injustice. As the New Testament Jesus says, he and his Father (God in heaven) are One.

So at this milestone of a birthday, what do I do with God? That for me is the easy part. I choose all over again to love God with my whole being. There aren't any better alternatives anyway, are there? And what do I do with life? I choose to obey God, which I understand from Micah 6:8 is to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with my God who has called me to love my neighbor as I love myself (that's from Leviticus 19:18).

Even though I'm 55, I don't have to have all the answers. And I really don't like it when people smugly think they do and don't even bother to ask what the questions are. As Evangelist Tom Skinner wrote in the '70s, "If Christ is the answer, what are the questions?" I hate it when people don't take time to listen, ponder questions and savor the process of finding answers that don't always add up in our finite brains.

I figure God doesn't need me to have all the answers either as He already has them. He just wants me to love people so they can discover Him and find healing for their pain. I'm also beginning to discover that even in just asking questions, I can help people find healing – especially when I give voice to their own questions, questions others don't want them asking, but questions that open vents in their pain and allow God's Hgood stuff to flow in.