A Labyrinthine Journey

I had a dream last night. It was a dream that raised the very important question of what questions we ask God that guide us in mission and ministry.

In the dream, a group of young people were sent out into the community for a day. They come back to report.

One young woman comes all sad, and frustrated. She tells of all the tales of woe she witnessed and heard throughout the day.

“God, what is up with all this disease and bad in the world? It is just too much. How can you stand it?”

Another young woman followed and shared how she all those things, too. yet, she also saw people holding on to hope and still getting up to face another day. She saw babies being born and children playing and being taught. She also saw people laughing and loving.

“God, if we are all dying, this life-threatening stuff makes sense, why don’t you just throw in the towel?” So, what is up with all this life I saw?”

And there ends the dream. I woke up enough to jot down that dialog, but I’ve been mulling this snippet over ever since.

We cannot deny the presence of evil and all that threatens life in our world. Utter despair is what makes sense when we consider the evidence of the world around us and our own mortality. And we could approach the world lost in that despair. I am humbled by how often I find myself seeing and therefore believing only the worst.

Yet, God, what is up with all this life you infect our lives with? You keep bringing us moments of renewed energy and clarity. You turn winter into spring and summer. You come to the darkest shadows and where you show up there is light. People die in our lives. New relationships are born and reborn more often. And even as the time leads us toward mortality, you keep on living in and around us.

As I witness the tears of sorrow, God, help me see your light. As I wrestle along with someone who is seeking freedom, God, show how the chains are being taken away. As I think all this is just too much, surprise me.

Yesterday’s post about my initial responses to Ephesians 2 was a strange one for me to write. It as one of those let’s get the words down raw and let them just sit there as they are. I don’t think I will preach that passage in just that way. And for me it was a risk to write it that way, but it was a choice.

A choice of voice.

In my study of the enneagram I continue to see myself as a Type 8. If you do any kind of looking at the Enneagram types the 8 is the more strong willed, in your face, powerful leader. I am learning to see where I do intimidate people, and I am learning to accept that as my type energy at work. Yet, I have spent years not liking the commonly expected voice of the Enneagram 8, what I am thinking of as the Confrontation Voice.

Before I knew of the Enneagram, I had observed some very clear examples of that Confrontation Voice from church leaders. I saw the harm those harsh words had on my life and on the lives of others. So as I was seeking my own voice as a preacher and a leader I intentionally sought a different voice. It was those years of cultivating a non-confrontational and peacemaking voice that led me first to see my Enneagram Type as a 9. I was content with that.

So one of my struggles with the Enneagram has been accepting that I do have that Confrontational Energy and voice within me. Part of that acceptance is to find healthy ways to practice it. And practice is the operative word there. I am clumsy with my Enneagram 8 energy and voice. It is a shift of years of practice to become open to an important part of how God made me.

So yesterday’s post was a practice exercise in that more Confrontational Voice that is one of my authentic voices.

My preferred preaching voice? Invitational. And I can see how that can be just as bold and clear of a type 8 voice as the more confrontational one can be.

To me, the Bible is a collection of God’s loving invitations to us. Invitations to live a life aligned with the righteousness and love that God showed us in creating us, tending us, redeeming us, and transforming us. One of my pastors said once that God does not break into our lives to invade us, that is evil’s modus operandi. God knocks gently and persistently on the doors of our hearts inviting us to open and welcome in the Essence of the Divine. We can choose to ignore the invitation and we can refuse it, and God’s grace will respect that choice.

Yet, God will keep on offering the invitation. As long as we have life in our bodies God will keep on offering that invitation. And I’m even open to the idea that not even death will stop God from that extended grace (can we say purgatory?).

Even in the Ephesians 2 and Acts 10 passages, I can just as easily see God reaching out in love to Us and reaching out in love to Them and then looking at each of us with those sparkling/piercing eyes of grace and saying,…

“Shall we dance together?”

That’s a great invitation.

Working on this Sunday’s sermon on Ephesians 2:11-22. I used to read those words about the dividing wall and the strangers to the promise language as thought that God was the one who had set up the rules and boundaries. With that idea, then Jesus came to remove God’s barriers to salvation and grace.

Today, I saw a whole new perspective.

To Paul, the boundaries, the walls, and the hostilities are the creation of us humans. We call each other the circumcised and the uncircumcised. We set up the ordinances that determine who we see is In and who is Out. The divisions are ours and since people think what we say is the right way, then our ideas of who has hope and who are hopeless are received and accepted by those we tell.

The walls are ours. The Iron Curtains, the Border Patrols, Us, and Them are things we create.

Christ came to break through our own ideas of who are strangers. And our kind are never strangers.

In Ephesians 2:16, God’s strategy is to reconcile us all to God then challenge us to respond. “Deal with it,” God says.

Reminded me of Peter and Cornelius in Acts 10. The Holy Spirit did the same setup. God already had Peter’s attention. God made an independent connection with Cornelius (one of the Stranger Gentiles). Then needed to show Peter what Grace had done.

The dream of the unclean food and then the outbreak of the Holy Spirit amongst the Gentiles, God says, “I’ve chosen them, they are mine. Deal with it.”

So, who do we as the gatekeepers of the gospel see as outside the circle of God’s love? And does God really have that limited of a circle of Grace?

Not according to my reading of Scripture. How is God asking us to have our walls and boundaries ripped down by Christ?

The answer is not easy to accept. God doesn’t force us to accept each other. But where is God breaking out in power and then stands there looking at us saying, “I love them, too. Deal with it”

As a preacher, words are my tools. Other people have other instruments and implements to do their work, but as a preacher and a spiritual director all I have available to me are words. Words received and words handed out.

While preparing to preach on Ephesians 1:3-14 last week, it dawned on me that language can be small or it can be big. It isn’t a matter of large or small words. Nor is it a question of intelligence. Language can lead us into our experience of past, present, and future. Our language belies our view of God, the world, our selves, and our possibilities.

Have you noticed how prevalent small language is in our society? Words and ideas that seek to contain and restrict our ideas and our imaginations. Listening to some people all you can hear are stories of a penned up life with a sparse past, a future without, and a present filled to overflowing with scarcity. Reminds me of the book that J.B.Phillips wrote, “Your God is Too Small.” Even without reading the book the title offers a challenge to each of us who seek to use language to describe the God who lives beyond words and whose grace breaks open every soul who seeks to fathom that love.

Then there is the story of the blind men and the elephant. Small language seeks to understand God completely and stops content that it has succeeded. What is left is a view of god that is smaller than our capacity and at the whim of each different practitioner of those words.

No small language or small God for Paul in Ephesians 1! Read those words a few times and allow the rich vastness just wash over your soul. With those words Paul invites us to dive into an understanding of God and Grace that is not small in any manner of the word. Abundance. Spaciousness. Glory. Riches. These words call us to an openness of life that is what we yearn for, and what terrorizes us. “Woe is me,” Isaiah writes in chapter 6 of his prophecy, “I am small and messed up and I am in the presence of Vastness and Wonder.” (my loose paraphrase).

Everytime we dare to enter the presence of God-words, we need to share the same sense of scale. Our words are inadequate. God’s language is Huge. Yet, God has gifted thsoe words to us as the bridge of life eternal, abundant, boundless and free.

With gratitude let us follow Paul’s invitation and live this moment and each new moment “for the praise of God’s glorious grace.”

Today, John Meunier wrote a post on The Gift of Wonder. A very nice story courtesy of his son as his spiritual director. It connected with a few moments in my life recently.

The other day, someone on Twitter mistyped sacred as scared. That caught my eye because I think it probably truly represents a lot of people’s connection or lack of connection with God. Like the community of the Exodus as they saw the awesome power of God on Sinai, we are scared by just the idea of God. Protect us from God we say. Sure we talk about God a lot and in theory we speak of intimacy with God, but when it comes to truly sitting in the quiet of the Divine Presence we fill it with our voices, or even the noise of our songs and words.

Out of fear we reinforce all kinds of filters and boundaries to our experience of God. We can do it with empty liturgy as well as with the illusion of casual familiarity. How often though do we accept the trappings of devotion as a disguise for our fear. Unless we are in control of the moments and movements in worship and prayer we are scared. So our ideas about God provide the means of our avoiding authentic contact with the Creator and Essence of Life.

While in the Black Hills on vacation last month, I sat on the porch of our cabin and remembered that the native inhabitants of that land held the land to be sacred. A special place that continued to invite wonder and awe. By holding it as sacred, they invited one another to not take the land or the gift of life for granted. The response to that sacred space was respect and honor. Instead of seeking to conquer the land to keep the fearful aspects of the wild under control.

On that porch I sensed an invitation to enter into a new relationship with the land. Rather than see the place as a thing to be used, manipulated and exploited, it has life and personality. The sacred land was calling me to love it with a different kind of devotion. Where we would work together as partners in the living creation.

The invitation from the Sacred Divine is a similar yet primal and primary relationship. God has no desire for us to so fear the Divine Essence that we do anything to avoid a relationship, but that we enter into that sacred intimacy. Yet we have to risk the scared to live in the sacred.

One of those issues that have been almost omnipresent in my life for quite a while is procrastination. That ability to put things off with regularity has led to more agony and trouble in my life than anything else in my life and in my ministry. I have tried all kinds of different time management and organizational strategies. Every year or so, I get really upset and frustrated with myself that I put in a lot of effort to get my life under control.

Yet, all those attempts last for only a couple weeks and I get back into the same cluttered morass that I was in before. Maybe even worse because now I add guilt and further frustration to the mix. The spiral of procrastination becomes a vortex.

In the last few months and especially the last few weeks I have been in another cycle of trying to wrestle the demon of procrastination into submission.

If I follow course, this attempt will last another week or two and then will fade away.

So, I’m trying not to follow course. I’m seeking this time for more than just a different technique (though I am open to tools that will actually work for me) but a new attitude to my dilemma.

One day a couple months ago, there was a reference on my twitter feed to Mark Forster and a new approach to working with lists called Autofocus. It is a way to trust one’s intuition in deciding what needs done at any time. I liked it. It fit better than any other tool I’ve tried. In the last week, Mark has released a version 2 of Autofocus which I am using now. Yet, it wasn’t yet enough. My struggle was still a source of great frustration. My war on poor management was still on.

Today I identified this as what needs to change.

In my reading up and studying Autofocus, I found a link to a set of pages on procrastination itself from the Department of Health of Western Australia. I am still working my way through the exercises, and I am excited since it offers me a new approach.

One important aspect of that approach is grace. As long as I approach my time use from a position of judgment and condemnation I was always working and fighting against myself. And with all the self-criticism all that happens is I dig myself deeper into depression and self sabotaging activity.

That hit me this morning as I was journaling about my frustration with my lack of motivation to change.

Before anything can change, I have to begin with God’s grace and acceptance. Even as I recognize that I can be more than I am now, I have to begin with who I am right now, procrastination and all. The freedom to become begins with the freedom to be.

That is God’s approach to our own transformation. Grace comes at the beginning of God’s work in our lives, infuses every phase of the process and provides our hopes and dreams. I heard someone say that God loves us enough to come to us just the way we are, yet God also loves us so much that we aren’t allowed to remain as less than we can be.

One of my long-time dreams is to write. Not sure if I will ever actually publish anything, but I have thought for most of my 51 years that I would like to at least try.

But I haven’t had the nerve to really take the risk of really giving it a shot. As I have been working on my own Soul writing about writing, I have been trying to figure out what is blocking me from even trying it out. There is a fear of rejection, yet that reason is not the greatest one, and that surprised me. Instead of being afraid of rejection, my biggest fear has been of being ignored. The idea is that I would invest my energy and time only to find what I write about being dismissed as irrelevant.

One of the purposes of my blog is to try to get past that fear. The fear is still present, because so far my blog posts only get a few readers. Part of the reason I’ve decided is that I haven’t followed through on the commitment to write regularly. So I am trying to step up the regularity of my posting. Not sure if I will get to the daily post rhythm anytime soon, but I am going to try to write something everyday even if I don’t publish it every day.

Which leads me to my second conclusion about my marginal readership: the quality of my writing. So far, I have intentionally seen my blog posts as raw. In order to not get stuck in my fear of how my writings will be received, I have just written and not dwelt on them very long. Some minimal editing to make sure I don’t sound like a complete fool, but so far, what you see are the first drafts of the ideas as they come. While some will continue to be that way (like this one), I want to step up the quality of my posts. So while I want to write something everyday, there will be some posts that I will work on for a few days before publishing. My hope is that as the quality increases I can gain more confidence in my attempts.

But what will I write about? I have two major themes and sets of ideas that keep recurring in my life.

One theme is church renewal. That is a wide ranging realm of thought, yet lately the Rethink Church marketing program has given me some hooks for the thoughts that have been deepening in my heart for the 20+ years of my ministry. In May, I offered a preaching series on Rethink Church that has been tying together my thoughts on church renewal and the place of spirituality in that endeavor. So that will be one area that will see some edited posts.

The other theme is a combination of themes. I have already ventured into that realm. Part of it is the enneagram and that powerful view of how we operate as persons of God. The other part of that combination is using the ancient elements of the western world as a map for spiritual growth and development.

I guess, I write about this as a public declaration of what my hope is for this blog as well as for diving into this old dream of mine.

I welcome any encouragement you might give. Thanks.

I want to say at the forefront that I like the United Methodist’s Rethink Church media campaign. I find it a refreshing reminder and call to the Church that it is important for us to keep reviewing and reexamining our calling to be the people of God, the followers of Jesus.

However, one of the frequent  and even valid criticisms of the campaign is that it is simply that, a marketing campaign that simply repackages the same old organization. For many churches it will be just that. They will take no time or effort to think about what they are doing and why they are doing it, so they will remain the same old people doing the same old things. And my fear is that if anyone responds favorably to the ads they see by attending a church near them, they will experience that same old church that might have kept them away from church in the first place.

While I can’t guarantee change (even in my own life), I at least want to give God the chance to transform me so there is a possibility of something different. In May I preached a series of sermons on Rethinking Church. Over the next few weeks I will try to put them into words (I don’t write sermons, so I have to either have the taped ones transcribed and edited or I will have to go back and try to recreate them) to share.

This one isn’t one of those, but it offers an important background context.

Our danger in the church is that we tend to confuse the Creation with the Creator. This is more than simply worshiping the natural world around us, this is a danger that exists anytime we look to anything that God has created for life and hope instead of trusting the God who created all things. Do we find ourselves trusting in the things that God does and getting so wrapped up in those things that we end up ignoring the God who blesses us.

I see this in my own spiritual life whenever I try hard to develop a spiritual discipline like prayer or scripture reading. I might even have a certain mount of success at it so I feel really good about what I have done. We want to be people of the Book or people of prayer. So when we look to the things that define our character or that we are proud of, we look to those things. Or maybe we have a profound spiritual experience (like Paul in 2 Corinthians 12) and so we want to hold onto that experience and we get a lot of mileage from how that makes us feel. So we go from conference to conference, or read book after book, or listen to song after song that helps us maintain that great experience of God’s presence.

And when the experience fades, what then? We try to recreate it, because that experience of God is what blesses us and defines us. Or maybe some other idea comes to us about who we are as God’s people, but it might dilute our self-understanding of being people of the book, or a praying people, or even a church beyond the walls.

The experience or the thing God has given us becomes our central focus.

We have slipped into idolatry. The created thing has supplanted the Creator.

The experience of God at the beginning is a great gift. Then we focus on the gift and instead of remaining open to God’s own self, we want that experience we had before. We choose the lesser because it is known and familiar and has become part of our image (of self or of God) so we close our hearts and lives.

The idea of Rethink Church as simply an marketing campaign to get people to come to church can set us up for that same trap. Are we simply trying to get more people to come to our church and join our organization (thus offering the created thing as the answer to people’s needs and wants) or are we using the living work of God’s people as Christ’s representatives, the body of Christ in the world, to bring people to experience God’s gracious presence in their own way.

One of those strange phenomenons I see in my own life is the cycle of discouragement.

The first step in the cycle is that I do something, or something happens to me that is wonderful. Maybe I am blessed with a surprising and special grace from someone. Maybe out of the blue, I have one of those experiences of God’s living and loving presence. Or maybe, I have done something that I know has truly touched someone’s life. A great success. A tangible and visible fruit of my words or leadership. I feel on top of the world. The day is a very good day.

Then, the other part of the cycle kicks in. The doubts arise. The emptiness in my heart is palatable. It comes as wilderness. My well is dry. The grip of inertia mocks any attempt I make to rouse my mind or spirit.

I hate it. It drives me crazy. It is virtually predictable and ever dependable.

Yet, I found myself today with the revelation that this cycle might be a great gift from the same loving God who blesses me with the mountaintops.

Well, Paul in this week’s lectionary helped in that seeing…

I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven–whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person–whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows–was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. On behalf of such a one I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses.
But if I wish to boast, I will not be a fool, for I will be speaking the truth. But I refrain from it, so that no one may think better of me than what is seen in me or heard from me, even considering the exceptional character of the revelations. Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.  – 2 Corinthians 12:2-10 – NRSV

Now, I don’t really know what Paul’s thorn was, yet I don’t think that detail matters as much as Paul’s process of taking something which really bothered him and frustrated him, and recasts it in light of God’s grace into something that does serve God and Paul’s love relationship with God.

Could my cycle of discouragement be God’s gracious antidote to feeding my own ego-centric tendencies? When I feel empty, is it a wonderful invitation from God to let go of my own experience of God’s goodness and to really trust in God’s goodness alone? I still find the discouragement hanging over my head as I write, but I think I will thank God for the shade and wait to see what God will do next in my life.