Besieged by Thoughts

It seems as though my thoughts are always against me, always willing me further, always pushing me to try harder and go deeper in my life. They never let me rest, I can never stop and just bask in some accomplished change or completed transformation; the moment one ends my thoughts start pushing me further. I am constantly assaulted with the questions that are the bane of any Christian's existence: Why am I so quick to sin? Why am I not more like Christ? Why am I doing so little? Shouldn't I be doing more?

Today my thoughts went further than ever before. In my office there are many, many books. There are books on theology, books on preaching, philosophy books, business books, Bibles and history books. They fill the wall behind my desk, and I love it that way. In a reflective moment this morning, though, I found myself looking at the wall of books and, instead of feeling the usual deep sense of satisfaction, I found myself feeling exceedingly disturbed. It only took a moment for the disturbing thought to crystallize as I began to pick out particular books with my eyes. I would look at a title and find myself thinking, "I wonder how many meals for a homeless family could have been bought with the money I used to buy that book." Another title - "Is there a child who lacks clothing or toys because I bought that book?" Still another title - "Was that missionary couple able to raise the funds they needed, or did my selfish desire for a book get in the way?" On and on it went, book after book, for about 15 minutes until I had to force myself to get up and leave my office.

My heart is profoundly disturbed by these thoughts, these questions. Not because I think they are inappropriate thoughts, mind you. No, I find myself disturbed by them because they are wholly appropriate. They are questions that should be asked, inquiries that must be made. Have I sinned in my quest to own "stuff." More than just books, this extends to everything - TVs, DVDs, cars, furniture, even food at the grocery store. Has my drive to satisfy my desires - even my legitimate desires - caused me to forsake opportunities to go good? Are the things that I own merely signs of my greed? When I go out to eat on a regular basis, am I flaunting my wealth in the face of those for whom a meal in a restaurant is an impossibility?

I don't know that I will ever be able to look at the wall of books behind my desk the same way again. More significantly, I don't know that I want to. If my selfishness is hindering God's ability to use the resources He has given me, then my prayer is that God will continue to disturb my thoughts and discomfit my heart. I would rather sell every book that I own and never buy another than live with the realization that the book on my shelf represents what could have been food for the hungry or clothing for the naked or medicine for the sick.

May God continue to transform the way I look at things and at people and, through this transformation, radically alter the way I use my resources. The truth is that my thoughts are doing me a favor when they assault me each morning and each evening. I do fail. I am not like Christ. I should be doing more. There isn't time for rest...

Guest Blogger: Victor Hugo

Okay, so I'm reading Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, and I ran across a chapter in the early parts of the book that is so good, so compelling and makes such a powerful statement that I am going to quote it in its entirety. I wonder if I'm the first blogger to have a dead French guy as a "guest blogger?" Anyway, here goes (the emphasis at the end is mine):

Man overboard!

But the ship does not stop. The wind is blowing and the doom-laden vessel is set on a course from which it cannot depart. It sails on.

The man sinks and reappears, flings up his arms and shouts, but no one hears. The ship, heeling in the wind, is intent upon its business, and passengers and crew have lost sight of him, a pinpoint in the immensity of the sea.

He calls despairingly, gazing in anguish after the receding sail as, ghostlike, it fades from view. A short time ago he was on board, a member of the crew busy on deck with the rest, a living being with his share of air and sunlight. What has become of him now? He slipped and fell, and this is the end.

He is adrift in the monstrous waters with only their turbulence beneath him, hideously enclosed by wave-crests shredded by the wind, smothered as they break over his head, tumbling from one to another, rising and sinking into unfathomable darkness where he seems to become part of the abyss, his mouth filled with bitter resentment at this treacherous ocean that is so resolved to destroy him, this monster toying with his death. To him the sea has become the embodiment of hatred.

But he goes on swimming, still struggles despairingly for life, his strength dwindling as he battles against the inexhaustible. Above him he can only see the bleak pallor of the clouds. He is the witness in his death-throes of the immeasurable dementia of the sea, and, tormented by this madness, he hears sounds unknown to man that seem to come from some dreadful place beyond the bounds of earth. There are birds flying amid the clouds as angels soar over the distresses of mankind, but what can they do for him? They sing as they glide and hover, while he gasps for life.

He is lost between the infinities of sea and sky, the one a tomb, the other a shroud. Darkness is falling. He has swum for hours until his strength is at an end and the ship with its company of men has long since passed from sight. Solitary in the huge gulf of twilight he twists and turns, feeling the waves of the unknowable close in upon him. And for the last time he calls, but not to man. Where is God?

He calls to anyone or anything - he calls and calls but there is no reply, nothing on the face of the waters, nothing in the heavens. He calls to the sea and spray, but they are deaf; he calls to the winds, but there are answerable only to infinity. Around him dusk and solitude, the heedless tumult of wild waters; within him terror and exhaustion; below him the descent into nothingness. No foothold. He pictures his body adrift in that limitless dark. The chill numbs him. His hands open and close, clutching at nothing. Wind and tumult and useless stars. What can he do? Despair ends in resignation, exhaustion chooses death, and so at length he gives up the struggle and his body sinks for ever.

Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who will revive it?

Monastic Ruminations...

As I've been reading (a lot) lately about the development of monastic life in the early middle ages, I've learned quite a few things that I didn't know before. What has been most fascinating, though, is learning how the different types of monastic orders developed over time.

For the most part, the earliest monks were hermits. Their goal was not to start communities, but to withdraw completely from society in order to better follow Christ in solitude. Inevitably, though, people were drawn to these hermits (or "eremites," to use the technical word) as they lived out their faith in the desert, or in caves, or in any number of solitary locales. Devoted Christians would seek out these Desert Fathers (and mothers), as they are now known, in an effort to get the Fathers and Mothers to teach them what it meant to follow Christ.

Initially, the hermits were often reluctant to take on disciples. Eventually, though, communities of disciples began to develop around these hermits. Seeking, then, to ease the burden of having so many disciples, some of the hermits developed "rules" - or a set of standards by which the disciples around them would commit to live. Thus, the monasteries which seem most familiar to us were born - as groups of like-minded Christians (known as "cenobites") withdrew from the world to seek solitude and discipline in a community together.

The next step in the development of monasticism was the coming of the canons. Simply put, canons were monks who served pastoral duties. Rather than withdrawing from society, communities of canons were often located in some urban settings and frequently were responsible for pastoring multiple parish churches throughout the countryside. Rather than withdrawal, the motivation of canons was service and pastoral care. They still lived in communities and subscribed to a strict rule of life, but they were more engaged with the world around them.

Finally come the friars. Friars were the next logical step after canons. Friars often traveled in pairs and, though they subscribed to a rule, they often did not reside in permanent houses but begged for what they needed to survive as they travelled. The main focus of many friars was preaching and evangelism. The call to withdraw from the world that the first eremites felt had come full circle in the friars, whose call was to return to the world again with the message of the gospel.

What strikes me about all of this is the similarity between the development of faith in the New Testament and the development of monasticism. Initially, Jesus could be said to have been a hermit - he spent time in the desert and moved about solo. Soon enough, though, people were drawn to his teachings and a group began to form around him . To be sure, they didn't settle in one location, but there is every indication that the disciples around Jesus had withdrawn from the rest of the world and found their sustenance in the daily "rule" of following Christ. After the ascension, we find the disciples holing up in an upper room, but the indications are there that they are still doing ministry - much like the canons. Finally, we see Jesus send the disciples out like Friars - traveling in pairs to spread the gospel.

Perhaps the development of faith and discipleship is a cyclical process. Or perhaps I'm just a little too fascinated with all of this.

Multi-Sensory Worship

Among people who study the church and worship, one of the more recent themes has been the idea of multi-sensory worship - worship that engages more than just the ears. According to its proponents, many "typical" worship services are, at most, engaging two senses - sight and sound. It would be more effective, then, to have worship that engages ALL the senses - sight, sound, taste, touch, smell.

The next question, of course, is what would this kind of worship look like in practice? How could a church structure its worship to engage all of the senses? My wife and I were talking about this last night, about what it might look like, when it hit me that there are already many, many churches that have true multi-sensory worship every single week. Any visit to the majority of Catholic or Episcopalian or other high-church worship services is a true sensory feast.

Think about it. You walk in and see the font of holy water - you dip your fingers in and make the sign of the cross prior to sitting (touch). As the worship service begins, the priest and others process into the sanctuary, swinging a censer of incense (smell). Soon enough, you are joining your voice singing along to the music and listening to the priest singing the liturgy (sound). At the penultimate point, the climax of the service, you find yourself kneeling at an altar as the priest places the bread into your hand and the cup to your lips (taste). All of this takes place, in many congregations, in a place covered with symbolism - in the architecture, in the art, in the clothing (sight). You leave, having fully experienced worship with all five of your senses...having been given an opportunity to fully engage with God.

Now if only us Protestants could figure out how to bring the same kind of unified, multi-sensory experience to our own worship experiences!

Why I love books.

About mid-January of this year, during a sermon, I committed in front of God and my church to stop buying books until Easter. It was unplanned, but it was good - although I did experience some fairly severe Barnes and Noble withdrawal. And once Easter rolled around, I was back to the bookstore as fast as possible. Since Easter Sunday, thanks in large part to my birthday being so close, I have "acquired" 13 new books and read six of them already (probably going to finish number seven and start number 8 eight sometime today). As I commented to my wife, I feel like I'm "drunk on words." And I absolutely love that feeling.

One of the books I read this week included the following statement by one of its main characters:

"...my relationship to books remains mysterious to me, but I know from my own collection that ownership is the most intimate tie we can have to objects."

I find this particular quote among my favorites ever about books. There is something mysterious about the way that books get inside us, how they transform from words to something more, something potentially life-changing. A good book is often called a work of art. And indeed, this is true - books like East of Eden by Steinbeck or Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand are works of art just as surely as Monet's paintings of waterlilies and Picasso's cubist masterpieces are works of art. To be honest, though, I think there is something about books - about the written word - that places it a cut above a visual work of art, no matter how great.

No matter how many times you look at the Mona Lisa or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the colors of the figures aren't going to change. Neither are their expressions. A visual work of art remains, to a large extent, the same. It is immutable, stolid, unchanging. You cannot look at a painting and then close your eyes and picture something different without altering in your mind the essence of the art. To be sure, there is an emotional experience of art that is as varied as the people who gaze at it. The emotions evoked in me by Tintoretto's Last Supper may be completely different than those evoked in you. Or any other viewer, for that matter. Nonetheless, you and I and that other viewer all see the same thing, the same colors, the same figures.

Such is not the case with a book. Words paint pictures as vivid as the greatest canvas. They give color to scenery and expressions to people. When you read the above quote from The Secret of Lost Things by Sheridan Hay, you paint a picture in your mind. No doubt it is different from my picture - I see stacks and stacks of books: old, new, paperback, hardcover, well-worn, never opened, fiction, nonfiction... And that picture in my head evokes emotions just as a painting does. What separates it from a painting, though, is the picture painted by a book is mine and mine alone. I do not have to share it with anyone, and probably couldn't if I wanted to. Now, not only are the emotions evoked by it different, the very picture itself is different.

That - if it's remotely understandable - is partly why I love so many books!

What's it All About?

I confess that this year I have been having difficulty getting "into" the Easter spirit. What I mean by that is that I have let comparably little things - problems, issues, emotions - get in the way. Instead of preparing my heart and mind for Holy Week and for Easter, I have been treating it as "the big week" of ministry and trying to be sure that I'm "doing my job." And to tell the truth, it's been killing me...almost like Thomas trying to preach about the resurrection before placing his hands in Jesus' side.

This morning, though, as I sat down to begin preparing for my Easter sermon - even as the thought ran through my mind that there's only so many ways to preach that Jesus is alive - I looked at my sermon planner and the text I had selected many months ago for this Easter. In fact, the series I am preaching this year is one that I put together while at Indiana Wesleyan, so I selected this text closer to two years ago. I open up my Bible to Luke 24.13-34 without thinking about it, getting ready to read familiar words about women going to anoint a body that wasn't there, angelic visitors and the like. Then I started reading and realized that, instead of a traditional resurrection text, I had selected the story of the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus. I kid you not, my first thought was, "At least I'll be able to come up with something creative."

I began my preparation by glancing over a book by Frederick Buechner titled The Faces of Jesus (GREAT, GREAT BOOK!!!!!!). In the section where he talks about the resurrection, I ran across the following quote:

If we are to believe in his resurrection in a way that really matters, we must somehow see him for ourselves. And wherever we have so believed, it is because in some sense we have seen him. Now as then, it is not his absence form the empty tomb that convinces men but the shadow at least of his presence in their empty lives.

About ten seconds after reading that, a realization hit me that instantly and dramatically changed my approach to Easter:

The empty tomb is irrelevant.

We Christians are too obsessed with the empty tomb. We talk about it all the time, we send out Easter cards to people with pictures of the empty tomb on them. We arrange our Easter celebrations around it. I can even recall several Easters as a child where the stage at the church was almost covered with an empty tomb backdrop from our Passion play - complete with movable stone.

Perhaps our obsession with the empty tomb is understandable. After all, it is the only tangible, physically real aspect of resurrection that we can hang onto. The empty tomb and the empty grave clothes are the only pieces of real "evidence" of what happened on the first Easter Morning. The problem, though, is that an empty tomb and empty grave clothes only convey one message - they are about absence. When we talk about the tomb, it is in the context of the absence of Jesus' body. The words of the women who first visited Jesus' tomb ring in our ears, "They have taken his body and we do not know where he is." An empty tomb sends a message of absence - "He is not here."

Easter, though, is not about absence. It is about presence. It is about the risen Jesus meeting Mary near the tomb. It is about the Jesus that appeared to the disciples, the Jesus who allowed Thomas to place his hands in the wounds of the cross. It is about the Jesus who walks down a road with two sad and confused disciples as they head for home. Easter is not about the absence of Jesus' body from the tomb - it is about the presence of the resurrected Jesus in the lives of his disciples. To wit, Buechner also writes:

But the fact of the matter is that in a way it hardly matters how the body of Jesus came to be missing because in the last analysis what convinced the people that he had risen from the dead was no the absence of his corpse but his living presence. And so it has been ever since.

The question the angels asked the women who came to anoint Jesus is our question as well:

Why do look for the living among the dead?

A Sin-Seriousness Problem

Needless to say, I am still close to that place I was a couple of weeks ago. I have worked up the courage, though, to begin reading again those books that God usually uses to challenge and provoke me to thought. Perhaps I am nearing the end of this prolonged period of silence.

I've been thinking about sin a lot lately. I know that sounds odd, and it probably is, but nevertheless I have been ruminating on the issue of sin - of willfully violating the will of God and the teachings of Christ. And I have come to a startling conclusion about myself that I am beginning to believe applies to a majority of Christians.

We have a sin-seriousness problem. A big sin-seriousness problem.

What do I mean by that? Well, you might expect me at this point to rail against churches that never preach about sin and start talking about how more pastors should talk about how much sin there is in the world from their pulpits. If you're expecting that, though, you will be disappointed by what follows. When I say we have a sin-seriousness problem, I mean something much more than just, "we don't preach about sin enough." I mean we have a two-fold sin problem.

On the one hand, we often seem to take the sins of outsiders - those who are outside of the Christian faith (i.e. atheists, muslims, hindus, etc.) - too seriously. We are quick to tell them why their way of thinking, their way of life is "wrong" and "sinful." We see a gay couple walking hand in hand and are assaulted by an intense desire to go tell them that God disapproves of their lifestyle. But we don't do that - instead we put some banal bumper sticker on our cars that proclaims how we feel about marriage and about gays. All the while that gay couple - constantly confronted with "Christians" who are against homosexuality - comes to believe that because of their lifestyle, God hates them too. They internalize a message of hate instead of a message of love. We have taken their alleged "sin" so seriously that we have stolen from them the realization that grace and love are extended to even the worst "sinners."

But there's another side to this sin-seriousness problem as well. Not only do we often take the sins of outsiders too seriously, we fail to take our own sin seriously enough! We gloss over our own shortcomings and our own failures rather than confront the truth and discomfort of our own sin. We gossip, we lie, we cheat, we judge others and we never worry about confessing our sin or repenting of it. "God will understand," we say, or "This is just how God made me to be."

Even if we acknowledge our sin, we rarely if ever truly mourn for it or feel true repentance. Our attitude seems to be that "God's grace will take care of it, so it's no big deal." While the first part of that statement is most definitely true - God's grace most certainly can take care of all our sin - the second part is false. Sin is always a big deal. Sin is what separates us from God. Sin is what destroys our lives and relationships. Sin is the reason Jesus had to face Good Friday. To take sin lightly or to fail to recognize the seriousness of our own sin even after we have become "Christians" is to minimize the significance of both Good Friday and Easter Morning.

This two-fold sin-seriousness problem - taking others' sin too seriously and our own not seriously enough - has caused many well-meaning Christians to look like hypocrites and it has caused many people to walk away from Jesus altogether. Isn't it time that we tried to figure out this sin-seriousness problem?

Jesus himself offers the solution when he talks about specks and planks. He warns his disciples to work on their own sin issues - the planks in their eyes - before even trying to address the sin issues of others - the specks in their eyes. We could go a long way to solving the sin problem by merely flipping it on its head. Rather than being accused of taking the sin of others' too seriously while overlooking my own sin, I'd much prefer to be accused of taking my own sin too seriously and overlooking the sins of others.

Wouldn't you?