"Ain't No Mountain High Enough..."

I have a new goal in life - I want to climb the mountain in the picture above.  For those of you who may be mountain enthusiasts, that happens to be Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa.

I know that this is probably a pipe dream, that I will probably never have the opportunity or the financial resources necessary to do it, but ever since I started reading the book John Bowling wrote when he climbed Kilimanjaro I have been obsessed with the idea.

For those of you who are thinking that I could never do it anyway, since I am not a big rock climber and I have no training for it, allow me to say that I have read several articles about the mountain, and Kili (yeah, that's one of the ways us "people in the know" abbreviate Kilimanjaro) is accessible to someone with reasonable hiking skills.  Though it is difficult, a novice climber can reach Uhuru Peak - 19,340 feet into the sky.

Such is my dream, and I pray that someday God will permit me the chance.

You Are

You are so big,

I am so small.

I know little,

You know all

You are holy,

I am not.

I am man,

You are God.

You are love,

I know hate.

I am nothing,

You are great.

You are strong,

I am so weak.

I want so much,

You're all I need.

You are mine,

I am yours.

I will not fear,

For I am YOURS!

Just something I came up with while praying through music this morning...

Understanding Redemption

Redemption doesn't mean scrapping what's there and starting again from a clean slate but rather liberating what has come to be enslaved." N.T. Wright, in Surprised by Hope

Thanks to the new pastor of the church in my hometown (way to go, Troy), I have started reading a book by New Testament scholar N.T. Wright that deals with the Christian concept of hope and eternal life and "heaven" and all of that.  The book is called Surprised by Hope and it is already causing me great discomfort as it challenges everything I've ever thought about the future of the world.

I grew up learning that Heaven was a place completely separate from earth where all the good Christians would go when God destroyed earth at the day of judgment.  Further, the understanding of heaven was that it was a place where my "soul" would go, and that the heavenly "body" would somehow be spiritual and not physical.

Here's the problem - how can that kind of heaven and that understanding of the end of earth be called redemption at all?  Wright is certainly correct when he says that redemption cannot simply mean the destruction of the old, for then all we are left with is re-creation.

The very concept of redemption involves somehow taking the defective, corrupted old and making it new.  Rather than destroying the old earth completely, God will somehow transform and cleanse the old earth and make it into the new earth - and while it will be noticeably different from the old earth, it will still be similar to it in the same way that Jesus' resurrection body was transformed from old into new but was still recognizable to the disciples.

In the same way, there will be a day when our bodies - our current physical existence - will be raised by God and transformed into a redeemed physicality.  What God did for Jesus was not the end of actual resurrection, but its beginning - it was not the end of a great battle but a harbinger of things to come.

I wish I could be more clear on this and I wish I could understand all the implications, but I can't and I don't.  All I know is that, in order for it to be truly redemption, it cannot involve the destruction of all that is old.

Purdue Football Rant

Is there any other team in college football as predictable as Purdue.  Watching the Oregon game yesterday made me sick.  As soon as Purdue got the 20-3 lead, I knew -  I KNEW - that they were going to go to a super-conservative offense.  So confident was I in this knowledge that I could have made the playcalls:

1st down - inside run (loss of two yards)

2nd down - quick slant or other short pass (incomplete or short gain)

3rd down - pass play that has receivers run routes short of the first down (doesn't matter if it's completed or not, we're still going to punt)

4th down - punt

That scheme held true in every case except WHEN IT SHOULD HAVE.  Up 20-3 with the ball and less than a minute to go in the half, and Tiller decides to get cute, which results in a turnover and 20-3 becomes 20-6, which eventually leads to 32-26.

And don't even get me started on the horrible playcalling at the end of the fourth quarter - settling for a 44 yard field goal in those conditions was beyond stupid.  EVERYONE in the stadium knew Summers was going to miss that kick - Lou freaking Groza would have had a tough time making that kick.  I'd bet Summers wanted to sock Tiller a good one for putting him in that position.

This is why I have a love/hate relationship with Purdue football - they don't know how to play to win.  Tiller and his staff have never figured out how to put an opponent out of its misery - it never matters how big the lead is in the first half, they always find a way to make it close at the end.

And that's not all:  What the heck happened to the playaction pass?  We didn't run ONE that I can recall from that game...the way Sheets was running, we should have been all over the playaction - it would have kept the defense off Painter and probably led to some open receivers and maybe even a touchdown.

Here's another novel idea: FAKE THE INSIDE HANDOFF!!!!!  Painter could have kept the ball and ran for 20+ yards multiple times when he handed off to Sheets on 1st and 10 for a two yard loss.  Or you could go for it on a fourth down once in awhile, just to make it look like you're trying to win - a fake punt or a fake fg, even.

Teach the gunners on punt coverage that they are suppose to STOP the guy who catches the ball, not run right by him.  Teach Painter that 5th year senior QBs who are supposedly Heisman candidates don't throw stupid interceptions and can figure out how to hit an open receiver in the endzone.  Teach the coaching staff that it IS okay to win.

I've got to stop, I can feel my blood pressure rising.

At least now that I live just north of Norman, Oklahoma, I get the chance to see what a REAL college football team looks like and what can happen if a coaching staff plays to win and not to "not lose."

Boomer Sooner & Boiler Down.

Why I went through...

Anyone who knows me well knows that I have a particular affinity for the writing of the late Catholic priest Henri Nouwen. Affinity may not even be a strong enough word - it may be more of an obsession.

That said, I ran across a couple of statements in his book Creative Ministry that rank up there with some of the more important things I've read in the last few months. The book itself is about pastoral theology, or the relationship between the role that the pastor plays with his or her congregation and the role that the pastor plays in the Kingdom of God.

In the chapter on individual pastoral care (i.e. hospital visits, counseling, etc.), Nouwen talks about the pastor's need to be vulnerable with people - an idea that finds significant development in Nouwen's later works. While talking about this, he points out that pastors need to be both self-affirming and self-emptying:

"But self-affirmation and self-emptying are not opposites, because we can never give away what we do not have. We are unable to give ourselves in love when we are not aware of ourselves. We don't ever come to intimacy without having found and claimed our identity."

This is a truth that I have worked hard to resist, and it is a truth that is counter to the traditional understanding of ministry as a "profession." The current train of thought is that the pastor has to be able to be "professional" in every situation - by which is meant the pastor needs to be emotionally detached if he or she is going to be effective. The pastor is never called to completely surrender himself or herself to the life of the church - the pastor must retain a sense of personal identity that is sacrosanct.

Nouwen goes on to say:

"Through long and often painful formation and training, we ministers have to find our place in life, to discover our own contribution, and to affirm our own self: not to cling to it and claim it as our own unique property, but to go out, offer our services to others, and empty ourselves so that God can speak through us and invite others to new life."

I read that second quote and had one of those "Aha!" moments. I am one of those people who likes to look back at the seasons of my life and try to discern where God was moving and how God was shaping me...I find that it helps me retain hope in the future moving and shaping that God will do in my life. Anyway, I was contemplating Nouwen's words and thinking about the two years of my life that I spent outside of pastoral ministry; those times when I began to wonder if I was ever going to find that church God meant for me to lead; those months and months of living with family and answering the same tough questions about our future every Sunday at church.

I'm beginning to think that those times were part of what Nouwen calls "long and painful formation" in which I had to discover my identity and learn to affirm my own self and to prepare for the next step in that formation, which is happening here in Oklahoma - the emptying of that identity and self into others around me so that "God can speak through me and invite others to new life."

I still won't say that I enjoyed those two years. But I can say that I'm beginning to see that God was there and working and that every moment of those two years played an important role in preparing me to lead in His church. And that means it was all worth it.

First Lectionary Sermon

This week is the first week I am preaching from the lectionary.  I've got to say that I prefer to do it the other way.  With series preaching, I already know the basic message I'm trying to communicate and just need to use the text to confirm that message.  While I have to do exegesis, it's more of a "directed" exegesis.

Lectionary preaching, though, requires that I sit down with just the text and absolutely no idea of the message.  Then I have to read the text, study the text, look at the Greek/Hebrew and then ask the question:

What does this text have to say to the congregation God has given me to lead?

All that to say that sermon writing this week was a bigger challenge than that to which I am accustomed.  I had to say to God before I sat down to write that, if He didn't show up while I was typing the sermon, there would be nothing to say on Sunday.  I confess that I didn't like that at all, I would prefer to rely on my own ability to form creative sermons.

At the end of the day, I wrote the sermon.  And I am confident that it is not the exclusive product of my own biases.  Now, is it good?

We'll find that out on Sunday.