A Labyrinthine Journey

As a pastor, I see the great toll fear and anxiety brings to every member of my church. As someone who breathes I know how pervasive fear is in my life and my family. As a member of society, it distresses me to see how fear is a motivator behind most of our business, church, and personal decisions. Fear clouds even the strongest person’s point of view and it damages bodies, hearts, minds, spirits, and relationships.

In his book, Fearless, Max Lucado examines 13 ways we need to hear Jesus’ invitation to “fear not.” He makes real how we experience fear and then brings meaning to the hope and comfort Jesus’ words bring to us. I have enjoyed many of Lucado’s books, yet this one touched me most personally. I am deeply thankful and recommend this book for that reason alone.

As a bonus, the end of the book contains questions for group discussion that can brings Christ’s invitation to “live without fear” to many people in my congregation.

It is time to free ourselves from the power of fear in our lives. This book points us to how Jesus can bring us that freedom.

Jesus tells the story of two houses (Matthew 7:24-27). Both houses face great dangers: storms come, waves crash, and winds blow. Can you feel the fear and anxiety?

Sounds familiar. We face many events that trigger anxiety. Does anyone really know what is going on with the economy? Many people’s futures hold uncertainty. Billions of people in our world aren’t even sure what today holds. Families and friendships near to us are being stretched and are breaking or are broken. With each passing day and year we find our bodies and minds unable to work the way we want them and we wonder what is happening to us. We listen to and read the news from around the world and around the corner and hear all the dangers from people who seek power through violence and about microscopic organisms that could be anywhere. The stress-inducing list continues endlessly.

Back to the two houses of Jesus’ story. One house withstands the storms, one house falls apart. What is the difference?

One house is built on the shifting sands of myriad lesser voices around and within us? We try to follow popular opinion, but it is always fickle and gets blown about by the winds of fear. It doesn’t work to follow whatever is trendy, interesting, or in our face either; nothing solid there. An ancient writer talks about bad and harmful thoughts that destabilize our soul’s foundation: pride, envy, anger, greed, apathy, lust and gluttony. So often the voices of other people’s disapproval and judgment lead us to the more fearful responses. Some voices tell us there really isn’t anything to be afraid of, then reality comes crashing against us. Other voices only cry out that we are doomed. All these sandy voices see only part of the truth of life.

So we come to the second house. This house is built on solid rock, a whole and holy view of God’s greater reality. Here we see something deeper and more enduring than the shifting sands of time and the passing waves of the fear-tsunamis and anxiety-storms. When Jesus invites us into a worry-less life (Matthew 6:25-34) he does so based on a foundation of hoping and knowing that God’s great Love is the bigger truth that underlies and fills our life.

How do we build on that foundation? By returning again and again to the story of God’s love for us. Read your Bible to keep remembering, gather in worship with a community of faith people, and exercise that growing hope in prayer.

At our local National Day of Prayer, I offered the Global prayer. Here is my prayer…

O God, you remind us daily that we are all connected in one global community. What happens in one corner of our planet touches our lives and our choices affect the whole. Help us to see our political borders and divisions as human constructions and not part of your divine creation and plan.

Grant us the grace to be better stewards of your creation and better neighbors. May each of us continue to seek justice in all our relationships, wisdom in all our ideas and attitudes and peace in our hearts and in our world.

I pray today for each of the over 6.7 billion members of our world-wide community. Touch each life with your righteousness and love. May each one know your life-giving presence in some way today.

Sorry for the lack of posting, not even sure why, but know that I want to get back. Here is one way I am going to try, spiritual quotes. I am currently working through Benedicta Ward’s The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, (Cistercian Publications, Kalamazoo, 1975)

Abba Anthony says:

A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, “You are mad, you are not like us.” [#25, p 6]

My immediate thought is that we are in that time. And which mad am I?

In a big sense, that lays out the essence of what many of will be doing during this American holiday. Many of us will gather with family (ours will be just 4 for Thursday) and others will not. One of the things I have been sensitive to for many years of meeting a few Native Americans, some of whom became friends, is that some of our celebration days are days of sadness for them.

There was a time when some sensitive people had the idea of denying those historical remembering days. While I have been one to not overplay some of those days, I have not been too much in favor of forgetting history.

I think we need to face these mixed heritage days (joy for some and sorrow for others) with an eye for learning and then remembering the fuller stories. Yet, isn’t that what most of our celebration days have become? War-based rememberance days like Veteran’s Day or Memorial Day are days to honor those living who served while also remembering with sighs those who served and died. And if we want to remember those days more fully we must stop and mourn the loss to other nations in terms of people and infrastructure because of those wars. Too much needless loss, needs to be remembered but then should spur us to live so it will not happen any longer.

Anyway, that wasn’t where I really started to go: thanksgiving. I found a good article written by a Keetoowah Cherokee Indian teacher and pastor on the site for Sojourners magazine.

Rev. Randy Woodley on God’s Politics

According to Barack Obama’s new book, white guilt has already run its course, so my sense now is to move quickly past how bad it really is – and it really is bad – and on to suggesting a way for us to heal.

There does come a point where the remembering and the honoring and listening and sharing need to be turned toward the purpose of healing. This is especially true when the contexts are broken relationships and cultural injustice. Healing does not come through overplaying the stories or forgetting them, healing comes by living through them to a new reality of relationship and society. A new culture of respect and commitment to be trusting and trustworthy.

The best point in Randy’s article (go read it if you haven’t yet) is the importance of humor in healing. A humor that can both gently and sharply lead us all to take ourselves less seriously and to find common ground in our humanness.

So, eat, laugh, remember, and sigh this Thanksgiving. It is good for the soul.

This year we are hosting a delightful girl from South Korea through EF Foundation (I will call her Teresa, a name given her by some other students). I haven’t had a chance to talk with her about her reactions to the whole buildup of words and fear coming from the North Korean part of the peninsula. Today, she brought it up.

A teacher was asking students what they thought of North Korea seeking to build nuclear weapons. Our Teresa said that she couldn’t answer. She couldn’t say anything bad about the people of North Korea because they are Korean like her.

But the President of North Korea is Crazy, she said.

That is a very wise and healthy way to look at any group of people whose leaders do things we do not agree with. How would we like the idea that all Americans are painted with the brush of the actions of whoever our current President would be? Not very kindly. Can anyone really honestly say that “all United Methodists” think this or that? Not at all.

We do best not to try to represent our viewpoint as that of our group or our country. And we must practice the kind of just respect for others to separate the views and actions of a few with the hearts and minds of the whole.

We have been watching first with disbelief and then sorrow at the story coming from the Amish community in Pennsylvania. A story of deep illness that reaches out and touches children with death and infects a quiet community with grief beyond our imagination. How would we feel? How would we react? At what point do we set aside the words of Jesus and at what point do we set aside our own anger and hurt?

Then we have watched as a community of believing people do the unimaginable. They hold onto their hurt, but allow their anger to be transformed into forgiveness and compassion. Whatever we think about the backwardness of the Amish culture, here we see them being examples to all of us who call our selves Christian. They have embraced the family of the man who brought this pain into their core. And I even read today that they attended his funeral.

That is all I want to say at the moment. What I really want to do it point you to an excellent blog post that says it so much better. Go ahead, click and read; pray and live.

Ben Witherington: Lessons from the Amish– the Power of Pacifism

This quote from M. Scott Peck (via Arthur Silber; hat tip to John Amato):

Once again we are confronted with our all-too-human laziness and narcissism. Basically, it was just too much trouble. We all had our lives to lead–doing our day-to-day jobs, buying new cars, painting our houses, sending our kids to college. As the majority of members of any group are content to let the leadership be exercised by the few, so as a citizenry we were content to let the government “do its thing.”

My first question is when did Dr Peck write these words and in what context?

He wrote that as part of a task force of psychiatrists who investigated on behalf of the Surgeon General the context of the soldiers who participated in the My Lai Massacre in Viet Nam in March of 1968. Arthur Silber brings the quote up in considering the situation that has led to the killing of Iraqi citizens in Haditha and other events that are sadly all too similar. I will leave to your own judgment whether or not Silber supports the similarities between what is happening in various places in Iraq today with what happened in My Lai.

I want to apply Peck’s quote in a couple other places though that while they are not part of such disastrous events as Haditha or My Lai, they are still situations for us to be concerned about.

One is the state of citizenship in our country today. All too often, we are too content to do just the day to day things that concern us directly that we are willing to surrender the larger issues to others without a thought until it is too late. Then when we are awakened to things not being right, we then too often spend al of our energy seeking others to blame. Because if we can find others to pin the failing on we can more quickly go back to our stuporous shells and not change our style of living in any way.

I confess that too often I have chosen that sort of apolitical-apathy because it is easier, simpler and not very messy. I am learning that building that kind of personal levy only hides the problems in our world and society until my protection is broken down and I am awash in what others have created.

Yet can I really blame anyone else for that? No, I have to accept responsibility for my flight from appropriate responsibility. When I stop paying attention, when I stop asking questions, when I stop thinking about issues, I will be brought to a place where I no longer have choices and options and opportunities. I have lost my freedom by failing to live the stewardship of freedom. I think I am a long way from being a full-time activist citizen, but I am beginning the journey toward responsibility by opening my eyes to the issues that events that are really a part of my day to day life.

Doubt that those things matter? Consider the price of gas you put in your car. There is no simple answer to why they are that high, but I am convinced that a series of smaller decisions all along the way by governments (ours and others), businesses, and individuals (including me) have all cascaded into the current price of gas. What is next?

The other situation where I want to apply Peck’s quote (hopefully appropriately) is the local church.

I will boldly say that one of the biggest problems facing the church in the United States (and possibly everywhere) is that we have accepted the idea that it is the job of the leaders to do the work of ministry in the church. (There are some churches that are truly alive who have learned that and are changing that self-contained culture.) Could this way of thinking be a part of why leaders (clergy and lay leaders) burn out? drop out? act out? or simply go through the motions of life devoid of vitality?

I will just leave that question with you.

I believe it is true. Our troubles in our local churches can be turned around as leaders and members accept the idea that we are all a part of what the church is doing.

The difficulty and the challenge is that it is usually only the leaders who will hear the idea and see it and want it to happen. Sadly, many of the others will just find someone to fault for the troubles we see.

Today’s Independence Day Video.

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. August 28, 1968, Washington, D.C. This is the full speech he gave in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I had only previously heard about 5 minutes of the 11 minute speech. It is all worth hearing again.

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A good dream that many are still waiting for no matter what the color of their skin.

I normally don’t just simply link to other blog articles, but this time I will. A view of those events on July 4, 1776 as if a blogger was there to write about it. The blogger in this case is Citizen Smash, an American Soldier, also known as the Indepundit.

Congress Declares Colonies Independent