Silence

Walking to get the church’s mail today, listening to music on my Zune, I began to think about what my day had looked like. I got up, and turned on the music on my computer. Then I went downstairs to the office and listened to air1 radio online. At lunch I watched TV on my computer, and then went back to listening to music. I only stopped listening to plug in my Zune and start back up with music.

It struck me as I was planning my “quiet time” that my entire day, and almost every day, has been spent with constant noise. I surround myself with music, shows, talking, noise. And even when those things are silent I still have the hum of electronics, the noise of the street, people coming by, washing machines, and dishwashers. I think most of us live like that.

We don’t even have silence if we want it, and most of the time we don’t want it. We seek out anything to distract us from silence and fill the void. But here’s the thing, we usually hear God the best when we still ourselves and listen into the silence for the Holy Spirit’s small voice. But when was the last time living in the city any of us have gotten true silence?

The people in the Bible lived before iPods and electronics. They didn’t have cars and lived outside of cities for the most part. They could go outside and within a few minutes could get true silence. In the desert they did not even have the rustling of trees or the calls of animals. And it was to these deserts that the early Christians retreated to when they wanted to hear from God.

True silence. We run from that, don’t we? If there is quiet in our lives we will do almost anything to fill it with noise. Even with God, we try to fill any silence with our own conversations. We fear silence, are terrified of it, but historically that true silence is where we hear God the best, removed from all distractions.

Can we face that sort of terror? Can we face silence to hear God? Do we even care enough to try? It goes against so much of how we live our lives, how our lives are built. But for centuries that is how people have heard God the best, in silence. Perhaps we have changed enough that silence is no longer the primary way we hear God, but it certainly is an important one.

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The Nail we Make

I have heard about Jesus’ sacrifice my entire life. I grew up hearing people talk about how Jesus died for us, and everything that went along with it. I have seen the movies, heard the stories, and read the accounts of how Jesus died. But it never really tied together for me until a few months ago. Let me tell you the story.

I love to work with my hands, and forging metal has been a hobby of mine for almost ten years. One of the simplest things to make, in fact the first thing anyone learns to make, is a nail. In older times, an apprentice would make 10, 20 thousand nails before they would be allowed to move on to anything else.

Somehow I skipped making nails when I was beginning to learn to forge. But three months ago, I finally got a chance again. I heated up the steel, hammered it out hot, and continued to reheat it until I had made a nail. I didn’t think anything about it at the time, I was just glad I got the chance to forge again.

But when I got home and was holding it in my hand I began to feel a little funny about it. Something about the nail I had made was very familiar to me. I did some research, and I was right. The nail I made is nearly an exact copy of a Roman crucifixion nail.

I had made a nail that could have killed Christ with my own hands, and for fun. That is exactly what we do, but I had never seen it so physically before. I do that every day with my sins. I casually do something because it seems fun at the moment, but in the end we are really making something that will kill. And suddenly we look down and realize it. We press the nail against our wrist and realize that we made it just for that purpose. Our deeds have killed us.

But instead of letting what we made do us in, Christ takes it and lets our sins kill him. I have known that for years, but when you have held the nail you made in your own hand, and felt it pressed against your wrist, and imagine in piercing through Jesus’ this whole salvation thing becomes so much more real.

What we made without even thinking about it, what should have killed us, Jesus took on himself. It’s as real as the nail I made, and even more deadly.

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Slowing Down the Current

A few weeks ago I was at retreat with my church. It was a wonderful time of worship, conversation, games, and the forest. I am a woods nut and the times I spent hiking around where some of the best. The places where I hiked weren’t exactly secluded, but they were nice. It was odd to hear trucks roar by just out of sight, or see a cabin through the trees, or a street sign.

And if I slowed down and looked around I could see beer cans, water bottles, scraps of cloth and paper scattered all around. I found myself walking faster when all of these distractions were the worst. And it worked. If I walked fast enough I only saw the creek running past me, and the lovely trees around me. I didn’t hear all of the cars through my heavy breathing, or see the things that were blemishes on the land around me. Everything was shooting past me too fast for me to see the details.

As I sat by the side of the creek for a while I noticed that it did the same thing. I sat watching a single piece of water and leaves just floated by me, pure untainted water. Then a bottle floated down the water and into my view. But it almost seemed like the water was embarrassed or offended by the bottle and it picked up speed to carry the bottle past its human admirer as quickly as possible.

I realized that’s how I often live my Christian life, and how I have even encouraged people to do that in their lives as well. We live in a screwed up world, and there is trash all around us, both literally and figuratively. We have struggles with co-workers, there is poverty on the streets, someone died, drugs are coming into our neighborhood, we’re depressed, a friend killed themselves, we’re questioning aspects of our faith, whatever it is there is garbage all around us. And so often the Christian response is not to pick it up, but to fill our lives even fuller with “Christian” stuff so that we’re moving so quickly through life we only see the good things.

I’ve done that. I’ve encouraged people who are struggling to get involved in a couple more programs, listen to specific music, read more of the Bible and more books, and go to more services and programs. In short, I tell them to make their life rush past them so fast that they don’t have time to notice what is going on in and around it. Make it so that they only have just enough time in their day to survive, and if everything that sucks up their time is Christian, then we’ve succeeded, and the trash is gone.

But the trash isn’t gone, we just swept past it. And when we’re not talking about a trail we can leave but are talking about our lives that means the trash is just piling up somewhere out of sight until no matter how fast we run we’ll have no choice but to face it. And when that day comes, there will be so much garbage from so many years that we can’t do anything but crack under the weight of years of personal neglect. Like the stream rushing its garbage past anyone watching, we push our junk out of our lives by sheer quantity of other stuff we fill its place with. But also like the stream, the garbage never really leaves

So what happens when we stop? What happens if we slow our lives down enough that the garbage can hang around long enough for us to pick it up? Well, first if will hurt. We’ll have to deal with our flaws, our imperfections, our troubles, instead of pretending we’re perfect. We’ll actually have to admit that we aren’t perfect, that our lives aren’t perfect. And that hurts, because we’ll have to also admit that all of the filling up of our lives and running at full tilt haven’t done what we were hoping it would.

But it would also mean we can deal with this stuff. It means that instead of running fast, avoiding our troubles, and thanking God for helping us, we can actually let God work in our lives and help us not just to avoid seeing what is keeping us down, but to actually fix it. It means we can be healed, but we have to slow down enough that we can see what is around us and in us.

I stopped that weekend, just for a moment, and the first thing I wanted to do is start running again. I don’t like having to see the garbage that is in my life, my relationships, my block, my town, my world. I want to pretend it’s all been taken care of. I want to fill up my life with so full of good things I can convince myself there isn’t anything bad in me anymore.

But if we just stop, and let God work in the garbage we find around us as we slow down, we can stop pretending we’re whole and truly become whole. We can stop trying to sweep bottles down our river and instead take them out. Maybe that doesn’t seem like such a big thing to you, but it is. When we are not afraid of our own lives, when we are so caught up on our baggage that we can deal with things as they come up instead of running, it makes all the difference in the world. We were made to be pristine environments for God to dwell in. we were not meant to push all our junk behind us or pretend we’re perfect when in reality the rivers of our life are poisoned downstream from all our pollution.

But it means we have to stop, and that is scary. It is scary to actually trust God instead of just claiming we trust God. It is scary to deal with our past instead of pretending that we have. But it’s worth it. I encourage you to slow down, and let your garbage catch up with you for a little while, so God and you can pick up that trash together and make you clean.

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To be scared. To be Christian.

This has been an interesting and stressful week. Our ant problem came back, and apparently some mice came in from the storm and are sheltering in our house now. On top of that, I had to take my wife into the hospital last night for premature contractions. I’m worried. I’m worried we won’t be able to afford to live if my wife can’t work for a while. I am worried that we won’t get this place healthy and safe before the baby comes. I am worried that I won’t be a good dad. I’m terrified something will happen to my wife or our child. I’m scared I’ll fail as a pastor, that I’ll miss an event or a crisis in someone’s life I’m worried that I will just be teaching people to lie about their faith and no one will come to God through my service. And all of that is a problem, because I’ve been told as a Christian, and especially as a pastor, I shouldn’t ever be afraid. Somehow to have fears is not to have faith to many believers today.

Should a Christian ever be afraid? Does being afraid mean we don't have faith? The Bible talks about not fearing, but most of those verses appear to be talking about when something amazing happens but people overreact to it, like the angels appearing throughout Jesus’ birth story. People are encouraged to fear God throughout the Old Testament. But the Psalms are pretty specific about not being afraid of anything that comes our way because God is on our side. Even so, Job mentions that he had been afraid and he was as near to perfect as someone can get. So which is it? We are fearful, or never afraid?

Part of the problem is that the Hebrew term for fear is such a vague word. It can be a wide range of stuff from outright terror to respect and reverence. But that doesn’t really solve everything. If anything, it just makes the problem more difficult. And am I seriously supposed to be able to walk into a gang fight in the Tenderloin without being worried? I don’t think so. An absence of fear doesn’t seem to be the issue. In fact, the Bible recognizes that we can even be afraid of God. We are worried about stuff all the time.

But to the early Hebrews everything was action oriented. Nothing was abstract. We can’t fear without it affecting our actions. If we are supposed to remember something it doesn’t just mean in our mind but with our actions. If we worship God it isn’t just with our mouths but with our actions too. The Bible, and especially the Old Testament, assume that our actions and our words are connected. If we say something then we’re also acting out of that, and vice versa. The idea that we can say something without it affecting us would be lost on them.

So perhaps what the Bible is saying is not that we should never experience fear, but that we should never act out of that fear. We act from our trust and fear of God, we don’t act based on our fear of what might happen. It’s like a bunch of sailors who throw out an anchor in the storm. They trust the anchor will keep them stable, but that doesn’t mean they don’t get scared when the storm comes. It just means that they don’t panic and try to sail out of it.

I am scared to death, but won’t change how I act. As a Christian, I have an anchor. Does that mean I won’t be freaked out? No. Does that mean I’m not freaked out already? No. But it means that I will trust that my anchor will hold. Not being afraid, in a very ancient sense, is a choice not to let your fear influence you, affect you, take over. That is a choice I have to make every day.

Too often we are told we are supposed to be super people, and if we have any negative emotion we have failed to be Christian, to have failed to have faith. If we think that, the guilt itself can overcome us because we all have emotions. Keeping them bottled up forever is not the answer. The answer is to permit ourselves to be worried, afraid, terrified even if the situation calls for it, but not let that terror dictate our actions. Our actions should be rooted in our anchor, Jesus.

Barbara Taylor Brown, in her book "Leaving Church" puts it very well when she says "I discovered that faith did not have the least thing to do with certainty. Insofar as I had any faith at all, that faith consisted of trusting God in the face of my vastly painful ignorance." Faith is not found in being certain of what will happen, or lost in the face of fear. Faith is found and kept when even though we are uncertain of the future and fearful of what may happen were are still choosing to trust God with our lives.

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Power and Ego

Well the subtext of this blog is “glimpses from a pastor’s journey” and so it’s only fair to live up to that title. I just got back from a retreat with my church and it was awesome. Check out this link to check out some of what people thought about it. I loved it, but it was a learning experience for me in a lot of ways. You see, I came on board with this church long after the retreat was already planned out and organized. So my role at the retreat was to pray occasionally and hang out with people. I was marginalized, and that’s ok. I have been preaching for years (months in this church) about wanting to bring equality to the church. And yet this retreat is really the first time I experienced it.

Sitting with everyone else as someone else spoke, helping serve communion instead of serving it myself, watching people choose to speak with others about spiritual matters before me, all of that was difficult to me on some level. I found out how much my ego is really tied into this church thing, and especially tied into being a pastor in the traditional sense. That needs to change.

It’s really easy to “give up” power to people as long as it’s temporary, or as long as I can grab it right back from them whenever I want. But if I am trying to give away power to the people of God and not holding all the power myself, then I need to be willing to let it go for good. I can’t hold onto it just enough that I can retain my ego, and retain most of my power.

What I learned this retreat was about putting myself in positions where I can be intentionally marginalized. Not forced into it, but choosing to be on the sidelines, choosing to let others lead and others direct, and submitting to that direction myself. That’s when my ego wants to rebel and say “but I’m the pastor.”

My ego doesn’t want to be a servant, it doesn’t want to be marginalized, even if I have been asking for others to take over and lead. It wants power, and I have a million ways to rationalize it too, so that I can hold onto enough of my power to stay in control. That’s really the root fear, losing control. But I wonder if that really isn’t the goal of the Christian life, to give control of our lives to God and to be a servant, intentionally marginalized.

In America, Christians have been seeking as much power as we can get. We’re trying to get music, money, movies, politics (especially politics) and we’re doing everything we can to hold onto that power. But Christians don’t tend to do well with a lot of power. It tends to corrupt us. Perhaps that is why the Beatitudes in Luke concentrate so much on the poor, the powerless, the weak. They are teaching us that God’s way is not to horde power, but to give it away.

That goes against so much of my training, and my culture, that it makes me shudder. But if I have been preaching and teaching that we are all equal with God then I truly do need to be able to let go of power completely, not just let it out on a leash and a loan. And that means that I won’t be center stage, I won’t get the spotlight and the attention. That’s tougher on my ego than I’d like to admit, but it’s important.

I don’t think we can truly claim to be following Christ if we are hoarding our power and clutching our leadership around us. We need to divest ourselves of whatever power we gather, investing it in others and in giving it back to God. Jesus did not even consider the power that is equality with God important enough to clutch tightly, but took on the very nature of a servant. If Christ was willing to be powerless and marginalized to serve others, how can we not be willing to do the same?

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