Repaintng Your Nativity Set

Merry Christmas everyone. As I have been sitting here and waiting for my turkey to burn I’ve also been thinking about the story of Christmas. We almost always seem to interpret the story so that Jesus comes as close to being like us as possible. Upper middle class Christians tend to talk more about the wise men than the shepherds, or interpret the shepherds as being like king David.

Other people concentrate on how Jesus came to the unfortunate and the poor in the shepherds. Some people concentrate on Mary, or interpret the angels as singing because that is such an important idea in their faith.

If you want to know how someone thinks about the birth story ask them to draw or make a nativity set, or describe their favorite one. My wife and I got a very lovely ceramic nativity set this Christmas that quite dramatically shows how much we interpret the birth of Christ. First, you might notice from the picture that this nativity is supposed to be native American. There is an eagle on a cactus, a tepee in the background, a wolf as a pet, and stereotypically-traditional clothing being worn. But there is also a shepherds crook (out of frame) and a woman with a sheep over her shoulders, which is quite odd because North America did not have sheep until quite recently, let alone shepherds canes.

You might also notice that not only are the wise men included in the birth story here (they came a year or so later) all the shepherds and wise men are women. There are no “braves” here. In fact, there is no Joseph in the nativity, nor any angels, though there are wise women. Perhaps most striking of all, however, is that everyone in this nativity is glaringly white. I am nearly clear and yet these figures make me look tan. Not one of them looks either Native Israeli or Native American.

What the maker of this nativity set did was try to make it fit another culture (Native American) without actually removing it from how it had already been affected by our own culture (they’re still white). The thing is, this isn’t that unusual of an event. We all do this quite often. We interpret the Bible and our faith in ways that make it most relevant to us, by concentrating on those few elements in every story that speak to us the loudest. That’s fine, the problem is when we think that what we concentrate on is all there is.

The maker of this nativity set seriously missed a lot of the story, and changed some more of it. But it was to make it significant to them. I’m glad they found something meaningful from the story, but we can easily see how much more there is to Jesus’ birth than just what this nativity tells us. The same is true with all of us and our faith. I might concentrate on grace, while someone else might prefer salvation, or holiness, service, love, etc.

We each find those things that matter the most to us and interpret everything else in light of those things. To put it another way, we all dress us, rearrange and color our faith nativity sets. But please, don’t think that your nativity set is the only way it can be set up.

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Marry Her or Die?

I am finding more and more than as a Christian I cannot just listen to myself and my own ideas. All Christians need to get fed as well as feed others. Because of this I have become a huge fan of podcasted services from other churches. My favorite site to find worship services on is www.hotworship.com which is a portal to a whole bunch of churches that either stream or post their services online. Out of those, I regularly listen to Mark Driscoll from The Mars Hill Church in Seattle. You can find his messages at media.marshillchurch.org. I don’t agree with his take on a lot of stuff, and he is definitely from a different theological stream than I am, but he’s great to get me to look at a passage differently and to start me thinking. He is a brother in Christ, of that I have no doubt, and I have never left one of his messages without having something to think about.

I was listening to one of his sermons on John and he gave a perfect metaphor for modern evangelism. I hope he will forgive me if I borrow it here. Imagine that you are sitting at home, a single young man sitting in your house when there is a knock at the door. Someone you’ve never met is there waiting for you. He says that he has the perfect woman for you to marry. She’s beautiful, intelligent, just the right age, with a great sense of humor, and everything else you could want. The man at your door looks at you and says that she is really interested in marrying you. The only catch is you have to decide right now, will you marry her or not, sight unseen?

So what do you do? The guy tells you she’s awesome, absolutely perfect for you, but you have to decide while she’s still in there car. If you are like most of us, you’d slam the door in that guy’s face and tell him to bugger off forever. No one wants to enter into a lifetime commitment with someone you’ve never met before just because someone knocked on your door. So you tell the guy to stay away from you or you’ll get a restraining order, right?

But instead of immediately leaving you alone, the strange guy at your door tells you that while he understands your worry, the lady in the car has a loaded pistol and if you don’t marry her, she’s going to shoot you in the head. So either marry her or she’ll kill you. What do you decide? Most of us would still tell the guy to get out of our lives just because that’s really scary and frankly very creepy.

That’s what we do so often with people when we evangelize. We tell them God loves them and wants to have a relationship with them forever, but they need to decide right now, and if they don’t decide they will be sentenced to hell forever. Is it really any wonder we’re scaring people away from us in droves?

What a difference it would make if a good friend showed up at your door and invited you to a party with some of his and your friends. Your friend tells you that there is a really awesome lady there he wants you to meet. He describes her, but invites you to get to know her and her friends first, have a good time, see what other people think about her. Which would you prefer? If we are really inviting people to fall in love with God shouldn’t we do it the same kind, loving way that we would help two people to fall in love in the flesh? Not domineering, not through threats or trickery, but by inviting them to get to know the person, find out what they’re like from other people that know them, and make their own decisions? God is awesome, and if we let people see it they’ll think God is awesome too. But we can’t force love and devotion on someone.

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Divine Judgement

When New Orleans got hit by Katrina do you remember the reaction that conservative Christians had? They celebrated that God had cleansed this land of a plague because New Orleans is known for Mardi Gras and the immorality that happens there. Not everyone believed that answer, but enough did that it became a cry throughout churches all over the US. People praised God because God had decided to wipe out idolatry and wickedness in the US.

So many Christians forgot that people aren’t just classified into “wicked” or “saint” and we certainly aren’t segregated into separate cities of the holy and the evil. Along with those sinners every city has, countless innocents lost their lives, their homes, their families. Christians by the tens of thousands lost everything when that hurricane rolled through town. Yet instead of helping them, some of the most powerful Christian leaders and churches cheered and thanked God for the destruction of fellow believers because they saw the hurricane as the punishment of God on a wicked city.
Lately it has struck me that I am waiting for the exact same thing to happen to me. I am a pastor in San Francisco, and every time I tell other Christians where I am, they have an almost viscerally negative reaction just to the name. If one day I and my entire congregation died in a horrible earthquake not only some, but the vast majority, of Christians all around this country will cheer at my death and the deaths of those I love. They will cheer at my death, because the great plague of San Francisco will have been wiped out. Yet I, and thousands of believers striving to follow God, will have been killed.

San Francisco’s reputation makes New Orleans look like the city of God itself. Christians refer to “going to San Francisco” as a synonym for falling morality and “going to hell”. Far more Christians would see our destruction as a sign from God than even the destruction of New Orleans. There might even be dancing in the streets over my death and the potential deaths of thousands of believers, hundreds of thousands of people that God loves.

I suppose I could ask how a religion of love and acceptance became so laced with hate that the deaths of our own would prompt cheers. I could question how Christians have grown so twisted that they could relish death and praise God for the suffering of others. I could spend this time trying to figure out why so many believers want to see death of a troubled city instead of redemption.

But instead, I want to think about what we, who are the ones others will cheer to see dead, will do about this. Do we give up on them like they have given up on us? Do we spend our time ranting against those who would thank God to see us dead? No. It does not matter what others say or think about us. Whether they want us to die or succeed, it should not keep us from serving God.

The best thing we can do is not to return fire with fire, but to love and serve people regardless. Let’s not complain that people “don’t get us” and “don’t like us.” Let’s not use other believers’ fear and hatred as an excuse for why we can’t change the world. God has placed us here for a reason. The best thing we can do is serve each other and love people in a way that makes this city a place where no person, Christian or unchristian, would be glad to see destroyed.

We cannot hate back. We have to love anyway, and prove them wrong through our caring for others.

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The Struggle With Prayer Pt. 4: Sacred Spaces

I firmly believe that God is with us whether we are in a cathedral, out in the woods, or sitting in front of our TV. However, our sense of God’s presence and our confidence that God is listening is often very contingent on our location. What I mean by that is that there are some places where we feel more connected to God than others. We each have places and spaces where we sense the sacred more than others. I grew up in the woods and on the beach, and when I am in the wilderness I feel much closer to God than when I walk down the street here in San Francisco. For others, the reverse is true because they are very connected to seeing God in the lives of those around them. Some people feel connected to God in churches, or with loved ones.

We each have different things that make us feel connected to God and help to draw our attention to God’s presence in our lives. These are the sacred spaces in our lives, those places and things that help us connect with God. It is important that we use these things in our prayer life. If you feel closest to God among people, then perhaps you should consider making prayer walks part of your routine, where you purposefully go out among people to pray. If you feel closest to God while among nature, then try to regularly get out among nature. For myself, though, it is hard to bring the Redwoods and mountains to San Francisco. My sacred spaces are too far away to help me in my daily prayer life. So instead of going to them, I set up a small sacred space in my home, using images, sights, and smells from my bigger sacred space to help me connect with God. You can see a picture of a sacred space I set up in my apartment a few years ago to the right.

As I connect to God through nature, my sacred space has a lot of nature images that I took, as well as pictures of loved one and other religious images. I use candles to remind me of the nights spent reading the Bible by firelight, and use incense to remind me of the scent of nature. This spot in my house is holy, set aside for no other use than to pray with God. Perhaps you don’t have a spot where you can do that, but we all can find ways of using our big sacred spaces in our daily prayer life. Maybe you can have a scented candle to remind you of the smells of getting together with family. Perhaps you can buy a photo album and put your sacred images in that.

Regardless of what your sacred space is, make sure to find ways of incorporating it into your prayer life on a regular basis. I find this is especially helpful when I am having a hard time connecting with God. Having a specific place, a routine, images, music, or smells, that are associated with God and set aside as holy and sacred help me to connect with God much easier.

Throughout Christian history people have believed that, while God is everywhere, if we set aside particular things or places as holy and sacred we can train ourselves to recognize God’s presence in those locations better. That is what we do when we treat the sanctuary of a church different than other parts of a church. We have set aside the sanctuary for holy use only, and when we are in the sanctuary we are preparing ourselves to meet with God. We can do the exact same thing in our own homes and lives, by setting aside as sacred places those objects, images, places, music, that personally help us connect with God. It doesn’t have to be huge to be significant.

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Discipleship Group

This really only applies to those who go to New Start Ministries, but for those of you who are part of my church, here is some information for you.

Friday Night Discipleship Group
With readings from “Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups” edited by Richard Foster and James Smith.

Background
This Friday was going to be the beginning of the discipleship group. However, Naomi’s grandfather died on Thanksgiving Day so I will be in eastern Washington for the funeral instead of here in San Francisco. So the first actual gathering of the discipleship group will be delayed by two weeks.

However, the first gathering was going to be an introduction to what the discipleship group is, with the actual discussions beginning the next meeting. So this letter is designed to be a replacement to that introduction so that the next time we meet everyone will be caught up to speed already.

The reason why we need a discipleship group at all is that we all know that what the Bible calls us to is not who we are or what we have been doing. We try our best to follow God, but on our own we almost invariably water things down until we convince ourselves that who we are and what we’re doing is all there is to life. We reinterpret the Bible so that it fits with what we are already doing, instead of allowing the Bible to encourage us to grow.

But that is the whole point of why Jesus came and died for us, so that we can be reunited with God and reformed back to the image of God we were created to look like. Salvation is only the beginning, but it is so easy to forget that on our own. We need to see different perspectives on what we as Christians can become to see where we have personally let ourselves water down the gospel.

Fortunately we are not along in this journey. Millions of people have traveled this road before us. And while only Jesus has fully shown the image of God, many different people have mastered individual aspects of it. Some of these people have written down their insights and the things that helped them the most. It is those insights on following God and being transformed that we are going to look at in this discipleship group.

The book that we will be looking at is an anthology of excerpts from many Christian writers spanning five continents and the last 1800 years of Christian history. Most of these authors come from various traditions emphasizing different parts of the Christian life. These generally focus on different aspects of what are known as the spiritual disciplines. Over the course of this group we’ll look at a variety of different perspectives and traditions. Some of these I can guarantee you will disagree with, possibly quite strongly, but almost all of them will stretch you, and me.


Discipleship Group Outline
We will be meeting every other week on Friday’s during the normal time of Friday Night Fellowships. The group itself will mainly be discussion based. Before each meeting, we’ll each read the next two sections of the book, and when we get together we’ll discuss those two chapters of the book as a group. If there is something that you want to talk about that is important to you, we can talk about it. Nothing is off-topic if you need to talk about it. Generally, however, the discussion will attempt to be centered around what we agree or disagree with about the readings for the week and how we can apply the same ideas to our own life.

The goal is to get exposed to different flavors of Christianity that can each help us to grow closer to Christ. There are 52 readings and with meeting every other week this is designed to be a yearlong course. Each section is only a few pages long, and is followed by suggested reflection questions and ideas to ponder. These are only suggestions, however, and we will first talk about any insights, problems, or applications that any of us personally got from the reading. However, feel free to use the discussion questions to start your thinking on your own if they help.


Accountability
Understanding how we have watered down the gospel is only the first step, however. We have all heard great insights that we have completely neglected to put into practice. The new knowledge and insights is only the beginning, we need to put these insights into practice as well. That is where accountability comes in.

Just as each of us has our own special strengths we also have our own weaknesses. Whether it is prayer, Bible, anger, fear, issues with appropriate sexuality, or any number of other things, we all have weaknesses. And we know that already, but we can’t seem to do anything about it on our own or we would have already taken care of it.

Along with the larger group, part of the discipleship program is also to have a personal accountability partner. This is someone that you will meet with one on one at least once every other week (once a week would be preferable) to talk about stretching points from the week and areas that you are trying to grow in.

The idea is to find someone that you trust and can be honest with. Whether this is someone in the group or not, or even whether it is mutual accountability or just them holding you accountable is up to you. Share what is going on in your life, pray together, and especially share what areas you are struggling with and what areas you are trying to grow in. As we journey through the book, you will hopefully find more ideas to work on and try out. Have your partner keep you accountable to these new things so that they are not forgotten with the next chapter of the book.

If you have never participated in accountability before, or want some sample things to talk about with an accountability partner let me know. There are many sample lists of questions and ideas that I can supply you with, including those used quite successfully by John Wesley several centuries ago.

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The Struggle with Prayer Pt. 3: Time

This has been a hard week. Thanksgiving Day my grandfather in-law died, so we are preparing to go to his funeral. On top of that I have two new groups at church starting soon, my normal church duties, my master’s class picking up speed, and general life insanity. It feels like my entire world has picked up speed and the world is spinning just that much faster than normal. Maybe you’ve had times like that too. It’s harder to concentrate, and there’s just so much on your plate that sitting down to do anything for an extended period of time is hard, and praying for a while at a time just seems impossible.

At times like this I usually end up praying for about two minutes and thinking it is an hour. My mind is just racing so fast and I feel so rushed that I run out of things to pray about almost immediately. I almost immediately feel like I hit a dead end in my prayers and then stop. But just like I don’t really get to sharing deep things with my wife for the first half an hour or so of a normal conversation, it takes time to get to truly talking deeply with God. And that’s time which right now I just can’t sit still long enough to give if I try and pray.

Fortunately, this is a common problem. The Roman Catholic Church has for centuries recognized that people need structure to help them concentrate in prayer, and so they use a rosary when they pray. The feel of the beads sliding through your hands as you pray gives you a feeling of progress, while also keeping your mind more focused and helping you to recognize that you haven’t been praying for an hour, it’s been three beads.

If you don’t have a rosary, almost anything will work that is something you can hold and has increments. Some people finger their necklaces, others more small pebbles down a pre-marked path with each prayer. Still other people make what they call “prayer shawls” or something similar where with each stitch you make you say a prayer. The ever increasing shawl gives you a sense of progress with your prayers, and also keeps you focused because with each stitch you seek to find someone or something else to pray over. This helps you from just dealing with the standard stuff you always pray about and actually move into the realm of needs around you and people you normally wouldn’t think to pray for.

I don’t knit or crochet, so this method doesn’t work too well for me. However, I do make chain maille armour. And so I have modified the prayer shawl method for chain maille. With each link that I put in, I say a prayer. This helps me to stay focused on prayer and not just run off when I run out of things to say. It also gives me something physical to hold and do with my hands so I am not as fidgety. Using the sense of touch in prayer has really helped me personally, and helped me to move beyond surface level greetings and into prayer that is about what really matters to me and those around me.

In short, if you have trouble concentrating in prayer, or sticking with it for a significant amount of time, or just fidget a lot, try some form of tactile prayer. It can be a rope, a necklace, a rosary, even a stick with notches on it. If you can, making something as you pray can be even more significant. Whittle, knit, carve, build (Lego’s work great, actually) or anything else you can do to help concentrate on God and keep your hands busy. It might sound weird, but give it a try, you might be surprised at how it helps your prayer life.

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The Struggle With Prayer Pt 2: Fear

Last week I started a series of posts about prayer, and prayer techniques. But before we prayer better, we had better start praying at all. It is so easy to talk about prayer, but actually praying is often hard. How often have you told someone that you’ll pray for them but never done it? I’m a pastor and yet I find myself doing that sometimes. It’s really sad, but true. Why do we talk about prayer so much and yet do it so little?

I have a thousand excuses about why I don’t spend more time with God in prayer. I am too busy. I talk to God more than I talk to my family already. I chat with God subconsciously so prayer is not needed. God knows my thoughts so I don’t have to direct them at God to pray. I am waiting to pray until I have the time to do it right. I don’t want to bore God with my minor issues. But in reality those are all excuses, not reasons.

The real reason I don’t pray more is that I am afraid. I am afraid that if I actually pray about what is going on in my life then I won’t have any excuses if I fail. You see, if I don’t pray, then I always can say “well I should have prayed about that more” as an excuse. But what does it mean if I pray about something and still fail?

And even more than that, I am afraid that if I do pray I won’t like the answers to my prayers if I do pray. It isn’t a conscious fear, but to some extent I keep trying to keep prayer as a reserve chute in case I am plummeting to my death, and am afraid that if I pull the chute too soon it won’t be there when I need it, if at all.

I know I’m not alone with some of these fears, and probably many more that I haven’t recognized in myself yet. The question, however, is what are we going to do about them? I can believe that prayer is important all I want, but if I don’t put that belief into practice its’ useless.

The problem, though, is that there are no magic solutions to make fear disappear. Only by trying out our fears and putting them to the test can we realize how foolish they are. We gain nothing by flinching away from God because we’re afraid. If you’re like me, right now you’re wishing there was another way. Perhaps you’re even certain that there is and have already decided to put off prayer until you have conquered your fears.

But there isn’t another way, which again scares me because these fears are my fears too. To conquer them we have to face them, prove them wrong, and that means we have to actually pray. Over the next several weeks I’ll be blogging about ways of making prayer easier, but in the end we still have to sit down and do it.

So right now, step away from the computer, go somewhere private, and pray. Not when you’re done with your email, go now. I will too.

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