Nothing New Under the Sun

Sometimes there’s nothing as significant as simply raking the leaves on a wind-swept day with your grandmother. She simply came up to me on Sunday morning, right after a lovely sermon, as I stood catching up with an old friend. It was in this setting of warm fellowship, within the familiarity of the church and church friends, that her idea bloomed up to me. And it did require going up, from her form their peering beseechingly to my stratosphere at above 6'3" altitude. The majority of the people are obliged to crane their necks to converse with my high lean figure, so this wasn't disrupting the expected. It had occurred to her in that atmosphere of reflected and deflected utterances of Christian love, rooted from everything spoke and mentioned in that high-steepled place, to accept the compellent nature of God's love and be compelled. To what end? To rake.

The next day I found myself waiting in the church parking lot: rake, jacket, gloves, complete with bagged lunch; all in hand for the days work. Talk was sparked with some comics between us, then pragmatics, everything else following and falling in between. The sharp notes of our voices rose and fell with every moment, noting the work to be done and cares of the moment, slowly weaving through to the level of the mundane lives lead from moment to moment, day to day. Yes, mundane, steady, expected, and yet completely magnificent. The magnificence of the everyday in and out, up and down, within and without. Her aged demeanor drove carefully and deliberately on the highways and low roads until we arrived at our first destination, my uncle's mother's small plot in the maze of American suburbia. We arrived, unloaded, and began the day's long work.

The initial fury of our sweeps and stows at the depthless leaves soon gave way to the rhythm of burying our hands into the piles to bring the remnants of last summer to the light of day, only to be plunged back again into the dark plastic wrap. As any work with the land demands, the work undulated with breaks for breathers and additional sacks for the flowing heaps of leaves. A glass of water and brown sugar oatmeal square later we had completely revealed the cold semblance of a lawn. We had both decided that a before and an after picture would have brought the full justice of the act but the conspiracy for good that day wasn't to be hampered by obeying the haughty regulations of PR work. Publicity and humility don't often agree.

As we pushed our meager tools and shuffling bodies back into the car and headed toward the next target for my grandmother's cunning campaign of unprovoked service. Unprovoked and unsolicited, she had set out that day to commit the terrible mystery of selfless charity, and the day would not leave that motive unquenched. The next task proved more difficult and by sight more intimidating, but it was to submit to the vigilance of our efforts all the same.

It was in the hindsight of that day, as the muted cascades of houses and trees passed my mind and the regular rhythm of the day had done its work, that I saw what great nobility and treacherousness belonged to it. Mundane work, a mundane day, everyday service, the everyday sacrifice that courts it. The wondrous damage of the gospel on the world commits itself in the most subservient, quiet ways imaginable. And the work of the day had not so much to do with doing, but in fact being. Being diligent, being charitable, being in prayer, being in love. The truth of the matter is that life is mundane, and is much of the time not anything but regular, rhythmic, earthly. The writer of Ecclesiastes lived dictated by the agricultural world, the world of farms and farming. The sun rises, sets, the earth turns, seasons come and go. What always remains is the work to be done.

What can we say back to the writer of Ecclesiastes, who tells us with such morbid fatality that “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun; Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time” (Ecclesiastes 1:9-10). There is truly nothing new under the sun for those who work toward good, and this certainty gives us great truth and trepidation, but also the possibility for great thankfulness. How long will the leaves stay off of the land? How long will the grass be cut and the weeds be pulled? How long will there be fear and violence, pain and separation? In the same moment that we catch sight of our urgent longing for goodness to come, and to stay, we find that it does come, and to our surprise, stays. The love of God has come, is come, and will come. It is often seen in the regular, the rhythmic, the earthly. God's love is nothing new under the sun, but it cannot grow old either, and it cannot die. The heartbeat of God's love turns on us with a breathing persistence, steady and sure. Yes, there is nothing new under the sun, and how much peace that may grant us! Let us give thanks for the steady beat of God's love in every moment.

Feel Good Music

There are a million movies out there to watch, and my family makes a good effort at seeing all of them. I would say movie-watching is my family's favorite past time, if it can beat eating food. Movies come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but one common denominator in any movie that has any challenge to be overcome is what I call the the "progress soundtrack." Take Remember the Titans. Classic case of progress soundtrack. Names like Lynard Skynard, the Doobie Brothers, James Brown and Three Dog Night are often implicated in it. Its the Gospel music of any cinematic soundtrack. Its "feel good" music, its make-the-world-a-better-place music. Whoa, they're out of training, they're winning it, they're on their way! One of my favorites of all time is Angels in the Outfield. Disney is a huge fan of the progress soundtrack. The same goes for Glory Road and almost any other sports movie. Change is in the air, the season for success is upon them. And it isn't just a cinematic phenomenon. A fleeting glance at the Civil Rights Movement instantly roots that make-the-world-a-better-place music into the real.

But here's something else I catch myself wondering: will there ever be a time in my future ministry when I will hear those "feel good" chimes sounding off in my mind? It's been tough so far because I simply haven't been at one place on the globe long enough for even the beginning credits to get rolling. It seems as though that there is always a breaking point for any place, any job, and that once the ice had been chipped up a bit things should build some momentum, right? Or at least I hope so.

Or maybe that time will never come. Maybe there will not ever be a time for that far predictable moment, often seen and always heard in the movies, for a progress soundtrack. And maybe I hope it never does come. Maybe speeding through the middle of life with a good tune rolling over the finer details is the last thing I want. But maybe, maybe, I'll never know what I want until I get there. These days I just hope I can hold fast until I hit through the ice.

Dreamer

I am a dreamer. I spend a lot of my time dreaming, and one of the very first thing that comes into my mind when I enter a new place or start some new thing is dream about what I could become, dream about how things could be. But so often these dreams I have are so far from ever becoming realized. I read a passage from a prophet named Isaiah which attracted my eyes to it in its brilliant poeticism. It reads:

"as when a hungry dreams that he is eating,
but he awakens, and his hunger remains;
as when a thirsty man dreams that he is drinking,
but he awakens faint, with his thirst unquenched."

It seems that there are times when I grow so desperate about the dreams I sometimes have, so weary of waking up to find that the things I desire cannot be mine or will not be mine. And on another level entirely, the passage resounds with great truth about my quest for God, my desire to be holy. In my prayer and in the dreams that run their course in my mind, I find that many times it seems that the things which are good are so desperately out of my grasp. There is more to being holy then just aligning what God says is good and what you think is good, more to doing good than just wanting to do good. Dreams cannot be realized by simply dreaming them. I am a dreamer, but if I could only do half of what I dream...

It seems that pinning my dreams down to the ground is my ordeal at the moment. But even more dangerous is when I am in danger of losing the capacity to dream entirely. The danger of becoming a realist is the chance of becoming a skeptic, and God knows we don't need another one of those!

Challenging Lyrics

Here are some lyrics that have been caught inside my head recently with Derek Webb's song "This Too Shall Be Made Right" on his new album, The Ringing Bell.

people love you the most for the things you hate
and hate you for loving the things you cant keep straight
people judge you on a curve
and tell you you're getting what you deserve
and this too shall be made right

children cannot learn when children cannot eat
stack them like lumber when children cannot sleep
they dream of drinking wells that can quench all the fires of hell.
and this too shall be made right

the earth and the sky and sea are all holding their breath
wars and abuses have nature groaning with death
we say were just trying to stay alive, it looks so much like another way to die
and this too shall be made right

theres a time for peace, theres a time for war
theres a time to forgive and time to settle the score
a time for babies to lose their lives
a time for hunger and genocide
and this too shall be made right

i don't know the suffering of people out my front door
and i join the oppressors of those we choose to ignore
i am trading comfort for human lives
thats not just murder its suicide

Despair

I have dealt with depression for the majority of my life. Chronic depression is a part of my family history. I can't run away from it, its a tendency that will stay with me the rest of my life. But...

But I have identified something within this tendency toward depression that is completely demonic: despair. I have felt despair a lot in my life, because the awareness that I am not very smart, strong, funny, successful or even disciplined turns my mind constantly to the fact that I am not good enough. Not good enough in so, so many ways. Sometimes my mind is stricken with regret of something foolish, or an opportunity run afoul because of me. It can take just one of many memories to make me wince about the things I have done or failed to do.

But despair goes so far past beyond this, and the reason I have gotten past my depression is because I have been taught to see despair for what it is: sinful. Sadness and despair is the difference of having no faith in oneself and having no faith in anything. I was reading a fantastic excerpt from a spiritual classic by Johannes Baptist Metz called Poverty of Spirit. Like many spiritual classics it is short but far too much to take in the first few readings. I have just begun to meditate on the meaning of one chapter titled "The Innate Poverty of Humanity." In it Metz says that we're all beggars in front of God. He says that if we realize how much we need, then "It condemns us to a restless pilgrimage in search of a final satisfaction, an "Amen," which the poor know is theirs only in the kingdom of heaven." When we are beggars we see that there is something that we need, and that it doesn't come from us. Despair stands strong in its own concession that there is absolutely nothing to fill up our need, nor the world's need. It's a beggar, putting us on our knees not in humility but in self-will. It's the opposite of belief, faith, and dying to oneself. It's the opposite of grace. Grace quenches the needs and the desires that we feel, it is the bread and meat of life. Despair leaves us feeling empty, hungry without the desire to search for anything real, it's the cheap soda that fills us up in lieu of real sustenance. It's atrophy, it's apathy, it's nihilism.

Simply put, despair is hell.

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." The key here is not asking who is poor and who is not, it's about realizing that all humans are poor. Jesus himself was poor. Now Luke's version focuses on the poor as a socio-economic condition, and that isn't to be taken lightly, but for right now Matthews' version of the beatitudes will do. The kingdom of heaven is the answer to being poor. It is at once peace and war. Peace to ourselves, within ourselves who accept it, but to those who relish despair it wreaks murderous destruction, denies them any room in which to stand.

In the story about the feast in heaven Jesus tells of the Master sending out for all his guests in a city for his great celebration. However all of those who had filled themselves with a fatalistic contempt for hope couldn't find the will or desire to come. In the end he was forced to send out his servants again, this time to invite the beggars off the streets. We are all beggars, I just hope that we can realize that.

Sadness

The truth is, I am a complete masochist. That's because I love sadness. I'm drawn to tragedy. I love sad movies, sad books, sad music. Recently a movie that I have been positively dying to see is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and it is one of the mellowest movies ever made. In it, Jim Carrey is the opposite of a comedian. But sadness and loneliness are things no one should look forward to and shouldn't be seen as fulfilling realities, right?

I recently have read a book called the Wounded Healer by Henri J. M. Nouwen, a man who has, through his ministry, connected with others' intimate weakness, frailty and sadness. He worked on a completely volunteer basis with a society called L'Arche, a community of mentally and physically disabled. He didn't just "treat" them, he lived with them in complete friendship. I heard a sermon directed toward the Village Church titled "Brokenness." It cited scripture many different times about God's love of the broken, the depressed and the lowly. I ran across a verse in Isaiah about God requiring Israel's contriteness of heart for repentance. All of these voices tell me that sadness cannot be avoided, brokenness and heartache are inevitable.

Now that I have stated the obvious, let me now try and say something a little less so. Pain and suffering are a part of God's plan, not apart from it. Tragedy, desperateness, loss and sorrow are part and parcel to experiencing salvation. One of the biggest, fattest false promises that I heard people make is that Christianity rewards its members with an ever-present happiness. The truth is that followers of the Way are faced with two realities, two worlds, a duality that some try to ignore. We have to take two things seriously: that there is a kingdom that is becoming present, and that that same kingdom has not yet arrived. In other words there are two "orders" of things. One is the ordering that we now live with, where things are how they are. Ultimately those things are completely screwed up, disheveled, uproarious and rife with bad intentions and good intentions gone wrong. When I tell people about missions in the Two-Thirds World, decreasing AIDS, eliminating global poverty, maintaining the environment, weeding out tyranny, creating peace in fought out regions, one of the responses that I hear quite often is that "this is the world we live in," "things are the way they are," "be a realist," "it's an imperfect world, deal with it." They think I'm an idealist, someone who hasn't lived long enough or experienced enough to understand the facts of life: that the world is cold and hard and inhospitable and nothing ever changes.

But what is "real" and just "ideal" is a matter of perspective, they come from a particular point of view. And for the Christian there is another point from which we are viewing things, and that is the kingdom that is here yet not here. It's the kingdom of God. Reading over Jesus' words, it is obvious that he was obsessed with this coming kingdom. His stories revolved around it, his blessings all centered on it. Most of all Jesus made this distant, intangible, "ideal," kingdom something near, even intrusive, a reality that couldn't be ignored or discarded.

Now how does this lead at all to why sadness is so necessary, so planned and used by God? Christians must live in the kingdom that Jesus made real, a kingdom that has no rhyme or reason in the current way of things. When we look back and forth from the kingdom of God and the way things "just are the way they are," we must make a choice between them. And both seeing the way things are, and contrasting the difference between them and the kingdom, invite sadness and mourning. If sadness isn't a part of your life you aren't looking to the way things could be, viewing the kingdom, or you just aren't looking at all.

It is only through compassion that we can be saved. The definition of compassion?: To suffer with. Compassion and Jesus Christ go hand in hand; there is no separating them from one another. He shows compassion by suffering with us. Compassion for others is the only way that we can save ourselves. Its not by trying to salvage ourselves from the wrecks and wreckages of our hurts and our wounds that we can be saved, that we can be new. Its only by tossing ourselves in with others' plight that we are free to love anyone, even ourselves. The truth is that Jesus tossed himself with us; just by being who he was he couldn't hold himself aloft. No one can say enough about the Incarnation, about him coming to us. Sorrow is the inviolable effect of the incarnation, sadness was planned, the tool God used that made Jesus the Savior.

Reality Check

Poverty is here
1.5 billion live on less than a dollar
more than a billion have no clean water
6 million children die of malnutrition before the age of 6
60% of africans suffer from water-born disease
800 million go to bed hungry, 300 million are children
300 million children are hungry, not from famine but from chronic malnutrition

The Gospel and Fear

The gospel brings many things with it: forgiveness, reconciliation, life, hope. People have spent their whole lives on communicating all of the marvelous things that come with the gospel. The opposite from the gospel, however, is fear. Even a proper "fear of God" is one cultivated out of a relationship of love and respect. Fear is as far from the gospel as the East is from the West. Despite all this we have come up with some clever ways to put ourselves right in the midst of fear, making it the center of our attention. Even when we are aware that fear has no place in our lives, we at numerous times spend extraordinary amounts of time and energy grappling with it anyway. It has the capacity to paralyze us, keep us from moving forward. Fear, despite its demise on the cross, has still been successful in sprouting like a weed in the gardens of our lives. It can happen to the extent that many actually start refocusing the importance of that garden to the weeds themselves, again making them the center of attention. Fear can be of many things, and fear culminates itself in many ways. Fear of failure, fear of not being self-fulfilled, fear of loneliness, fear of disrespect, to say just a few.

For Christians it can even be a fear of sin. Hating sin and pursuing holiness does not equate with fearing sin. If we are to affirm the cross then we must affirm the resurrection. The resurrection is the answer to the potency of sin, the answer to everything that we fear. The very nature of the resurrection and all that it brings: hope, peace, unity, mercy, compassion; all eat up fear. The resurrection has turned the tables on sin and death, making them powerless and in fact making a mockery out of their supposed power.

An incredibly powerful voice on the subject of fear was the contemplative Thomas Merton. He writes a chapter in his book The New Seeds of Contemplation named The Moral Theology of the Devil. "According to the devil, the first that was created was really hell - as if everything else were, in some sense, for the sake of hell." For many the avoidance of hell, and thus the fear of it, has become the center of attention. I have heard sermons based on fear as a motivator. Indeed fear is an awesome - if not to say awful - mover and shaker. Preaching "hellfire and brimstone" is a saying closely associated with preachers who testify to the power and grasp of hell as the motivator for salvation. But there are other, more subtle examples of how fear can infiltrate our lives. I personally have felt a great amount of anxiety for things I know I should let go of. The past tense of anxiety is regret, and I don't think I am the only one to struggle with that sensation either.

The process of consumerization, that is getting in line with the predominant consumer-capitalism culture of America, also has much to do with creating and controlling fear. Within the space of a 30 second commercial we are given cause to fear, and the remedy? To partake in the following prescription for a new credit card, car, alcoholic beverage, tooth brush, facial cleanser, etc. Or else! Or else we won't have security, peace of mind, success, livelihood, and more.

The entire promotion of the nation-state is one based on fear; a tenaciously fed and well managed xenophobia of other states, cultures, ethnicities and ideologies. The book "State of Fear" by Michael Crichton gives some amazing insight into this. Within history the formation of every nation-state, the U.S. included, has rested on conflict. The U.S. came into being only after the Revolutionary War. There always needs to be solidification against a category sociologists call "the other." Nation-states arise in the midst of conflict, and by touting victory of the nation-state against all our "enemies" (please see the "war on terror") it provides us a soteriology other than a bible's. In other words it provides us with a salvation separate and besides the one of the gospel.

I said earlier that the gospel brings with it the destruction of fear, the end to the totalitarian state of the devil. We are given the cure to not only the monstrous fears, but also to everyday anxiety and worrisomeness. It all links with the idea of stewardship and the fact that God has the entire world in his hands. All the resources in the world are already God's, including all of nature, our possessions, and our very bodies. Stewardship is just recognizing this and submitting those resources to that reality. Hope and faith also stem from recognizing the absolute sovereignty of God. With everything in God's hands, and we as heirs to Christ, what do we have to fear? Nothing! Our difficult task is simply realizing what is real.