greatness

When I was in University, taking the first of a few degrees (don’t ask, I’m still begging forgiveness from my wife), I found out quite quickly that if I wanted to get on in this whole realm I would have to align myself with some pretty influential people. I began to realise that in academia it matters just as much who you know as what you know.

A little cliché that works most places, I know, but I was amazed at how true it was.

I began to work with one of my professors, doing grading and other things for him. Then I worked a summer for him and helped with analysis of a pretty major research project. As a result I got my name put on the final project which was submitted to the Canadian International Development Agency. We also spun off a paper which was presented (by yours truly) at the Canadian Agricultural Economists Annual Meeting. I was invited to the banquet, which was much more formal than I had planned. I sat at the table with my prof, who was a Fellow of the association, and one of his friends who was made a Fellow that evening.

I felt like I was being welcomed into the upper echelons of power within the Canadian Agricultural Economics realm. All right, so it is not that big of a step up, but it is amazing how vivid that evening sticks out for me. I was actually approached by a couple of representatives from different schools that night asking me if I were going to attend their graduate program.

It felt great.

I felt great.

I felt as though I had some value, some worth. I began to think that there was something important that I had to contribute to what was going on around me.

I have met some people who still talk about when they meant to that meeting with the Premier way back in ‘72. Or when they were present when the Prime Minister found out he had won the election. Or …

See, I think we all associate how great we are by who welcomes us. If we are welcomed to the table of a Fellow, we feel important. If we are welcomed to a meeting with the Premier, we feel special. If we are part of the privileged few to see the first reaction of a person to becoming Prime Minister, we feel great.

For Jesus, however, greatness is not about who welcomes you, but who you welcome.

It is not about what tables you sit at, but who sits at your table. It is not about building up your own reputation so that others think you are important, it is about taking the very thing that God has given you, yourself, and giving it to others freely and without expectation.

This is one of the reasons he says that when we welcome a little child we welcome him. A child in that society is someone who is considered an outsider, someone who has no real say in what goes on in society, someone who is tolerated at best, but most often ignored, someone like the homeless man sleeping in that stairwell downtown, or that girl who sleeps in the park because of her internal torment, or the homosexual who is ostracised from her community because they cannot see past the label to the person underneath.

Can we be this kind of great?

stop hiding

“I am the Vine, you are the branches. When you’re joined with me and I with you, the relation intimate and organic, the harvest is sure to be abundant. Separated, you can’t produce a thing.” (John 15:5, The Message)

Image by Brenda Anderson via Flickr

This coming advent I am planning to join in something that many of the churches of my tribe are doing in our area. We are planning to join together in 40 days of prayer, asking Jesus to come into our world, into our churches, into our homes, and into our lives.

I have to admit, in many ways I prefer to do something a bit more concrete. I prefer to do something like the Advent Conspiracy that we did last year. Our community responded really well to this call to share, and we raised a little over $50 000 on Christmas Day to help provide water for places that do not have clean water.

I think we prefer to do something like this, because it is something we can point to that shows how good we are, or how caring we are, or how ‘good’ we are. It is something that we can point to that relieves some of the angst we feel about our relationship with God. The worry that maybe we, as a community, could be doing something a bit better in leaning on God.

We like these kinds of things because they focus on behaviour, and that is something we love to control.

Many of the sermons, and Christian talk that I was exposed to growing up had to do with moralisms. Things such as “Adam and Eve should have obeyed God. You should obey your parents” actually send the wrong message about the Christian faith, but it plays on our natural instincts.
This plays into the “moral temptation.”

Moral temptation: the attempt of the hidden heart to try to perfect oneself in the power of the self.

This is not something we do consciously, but subconsciously. We use an appearance of goodness to cover over the shame we feel about how broken we are. Something we inherited from Adam and Eve.

Their first response to guilt and shame, to a feeling of being completely exposed and worrying about how they were being perceived, was to try to figure out a way to fix it on their own (by sewing together fig leaf garments) and then hiding when they realised that didn’t work. You get the feeling that they would have been willing to meet with God if they had been able to provide a covering for themselves with which they felt adequate, not that this is possible.

When we experience guilt, our first response is quite often, “God, I am going to work on that. I am going to be better. I am going to pray more. I am going to do more. I am going to _________.” This, of course, only increases our feelings of guilt and inadequacy, beginning a long spiral into spiritual despair and distance from God.

But, if we are able to see that moment of being convicted of sin as a reminder of the first time we encounter the good news that Jesus has covered that sin. If we can see that the guilt we carry is not a burden which we have to try and work off, but an invitation to a journey of trust and growing intimacy with God, then we will be able to move away from moral formation to spiritual formation.

Even though it is a big temptation to focus on the practical, the numerical, the easily identifiable, it is more important that we focus on an encounter with Christ ;the author and finisher of our faith.

It is only in Christ that we can move from “I need to do better” to “I need you.”

““I am the Vine, you are the branches. When you’re joined with me and I with you, the relation intimate and organic, the harvest is sure to be abundant. Separated, you can’t produce a thing.” (John 15:5, The Message)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Reinventing the Wheel (godspace.wordpress.com)
• Interventions: The Real Distance of Our Neighbors (Luke 10:25-37) (gatheringinlight.com)

learning to lament

As a child I always wanted to walk with a cane. I thought it would be very cool to be reliant upon something like that.

I also thought that I would get a lot of attention from the ladies.

I sprained my ankle once, out of my own stupidity. It wasn’t really that bad, but I insisted on using crutches so that I would not hurt myself more. Really I was just looking for sympathy. It worked too. Some of the girls at school who wouldn’t look at me before suddenly spent time looking after me. The shine wore off after a while, however, and every things went back to normal.

I guess I just wanted attention, and thought that suffering would bring it.

Our culture hates to suffer. We do everything we can to make sure that everything is comfortable. To make sure that there are no aches and pains. We do everything to avoid one of the most transforming experiences there is in this world.

Last night we began a Bible study on the Psalms of Lament where we began to think about what it means to use our suffering as something that can transform the relationship we have with God. The Psalms, especially those of lament, encourage us to be honest with God, to be free with our language.

The notion of ‘liberation of language’ cuts two ways. On the one hand, we may be more free with our language, to let our language be liberated, not by being permissive or vulgar, but by letting it move beyond descriptive functions to evocative, creative functions in our life. That language should be free means that we will turn it loose to form new possibilities for us–allowing us to engage in free speech that is hope-filled.

On the other hand, the notion of the liberation of language is not only about free speech, but about speech freeing us. Thus we may become aware that when speech is broken free from a need for exactitude and permitted to reshape our existence and experience, we will experience new freedom that is not just freedom of speech, but freedom for faith. Language matters enormously. If our speech and the speech of the Bible must be too closely managed, it likely means restriction both of God and us. On the other hand, free speech for God may release the energy which leads to “all things new.”

The Psalmic metaphors we consider offer to us not descriptions but news, not situations but movements of God that will change things. Praying the Psalms means openness to God’s pilgrimage toward us.

Allowing our language to reflect our experience of life and God frees us from the shackles that we place on our relationship. It releases us from having to speak to God in a certain form and gives us the freedom to approach him as our perfect Father.

We started by having a look at the structure of a Psalm of Lament as suggested by Claus Westermann.

I.Address

A.The lament psalm normally begins with an invocation of the divine name, beginning a conversation.

B.This beginning address may be accompanied by other forms of speech: an introductory cry for help (Ps 12), petition for an audience (Ps 5), a lament (Ps 13)

II.Lament: A lament normally has three subjects: You, o God…; I…; the enemies…(Ps 13:1-3)

III.Confession of Trust: The lament often gives way to some sort of confession of trust, often introduced with a “But”.

IV.Petition

A.The principle petition/plea consists of three parts

i.petition for God to be favourable (look … incline yourself…hear)

ii.petition for God to intervene (help…save)

iii.petition for God to destroy the enemy

B.These petitions are normally accompanied by phrases designed to move God to intervene. There is often some sort of motivation given that urges God to do the requested action.

V.Assurance of Being Heard

VI.Double Wish: Occasionally a lament with ask God to intervene against …. and for …

VII.Vow of Praise

VIII.Anticipatory Praise

These are, of course, general categories which may or may not be present in every Psalm. In fact, sometimes it is telling when certain parts are missing.

Take, for example, Psalm 88. This is the only Psalm of Lament that does not end in praise (as far as I am aware). We began looking at it because it is one that simply describes the situation of the lamenter. There is no movement in it. It simply expresses to God a sense of being wronged and abandoned.

Psalm 88 (The Message)

God, you’re my last chance of the day.

I spend the night on my knees before you.

Put me on your salvation agenda; take notes on the trouble I’m in.

I’ve had my fill of trouble; I’m camped on the edge of hell.

I’m written off as a lost cause, one more statistic, a hopeless case.

Abandoned as already dead, one more body in a stack of corpses, And not so much as a gravestone— I’m a black hole in oblivion.

You’ve dropped me into a bottomless pit, sunk me in a pitch-black abyss.

I’m battered senseless by your rage, relentlessly pounded by your waves of anger.

You turned my friends against me, made me horrible to them.

I’m caught in a maze and can’t find my way out,

blinded by tears of pain and frustration.

I call to you, God; all day I call. I wring my hands, I plead for help.

Are the dead a live audience for your miracles?

Do ghosts ever join the choirs that praise you?

Does your love make any difference in a graveyard?

Is your faithful presence noticed in the corridors of hell?

Are your marvelous wonders ever seen in the dark,

your righteous ways noticed in the Land of No Memory?

I’m standing my ground, God, shouting for help,

at my prayers every morning,

on my knees each daybreak.

Why, God, do you turn a deaf ear?

Why do you make yourself scarce?

For as long as I remember I’ve been hurting;

I’ve taken the worst you can hand out, and I’ve had it.

Your wildfire anger has blazed through my life;

I’m bleeding, black and blue.

You’ve attacked me fiercely from every side,

raining down blows till I’m nearly dead.

You made lover and neighbour alike dump me;

the only friend I have left is Darkness.

Notice how this psalm never moves past lament. There is no confession of trust, no petition, and no praise. There are times in many of our lives when we feel this way, when we feel lost, when we feel abandoned. We assume we cannot talk like this to God, so we simply walk away.

Never expressing the hurt.

Allowing the wall to grow thicker and thicker.

I pray that we would be able to grasp the freedom we have to approach God with our experience. To tell him how we feel, and how much it hurts.

To express our pain so that it can be transformed into something else.

To expose ourselves so that we can be transformed.

grace

There seems to be an unwritten rule in our culture that if you are given something, you should return it with something equal or better. This is why some Christmas gift giving seems to get out of hand. This is also why some families have decided to simply allow everyone to get their own gifts with the money they would normally have spent on everyone else.

Sort of defeats the purpose of Christmas celebrations, eh?

This also explains why some people are so reticent to invite someone over. See, we seem to think that one invite requires another. If I invite them over, and they do not invite me back then I feel slighted.

If this happens more than once, I feel used.

I fully recognise this as an irrational expectation on my part, and is actually quite contrary to my stated intentions, but it is, none-the-less, my gut reaction. There have been times in the past when I have refused to invite someone over because it was “their turn”.

How sad. I refuse the fellowship and joy of their company because I refuse to give grace.

But, you know, the real reason probably comes from my lack of ability to accept grace. See, if someone invites me over then I feel this weight of responsibility hanging around my neck until I invite them over. I feel as though I am in their debt.

I hate owing anything to anyone.

Which is probably why I find it so hard to accept grace from God. It is so difficult for me to surrender to God because I do not want to owe him anything. Its not as though I want to earn my way to heaven, I know I cannot do that. But I still find it hard to accept his grace. I think that if I do as much as I can, then at least I will owe him less. If I can overcome this addiction on my own. If I can lead a few people to Jesus. If I can bless someone with a cup of coffee and conversation.

If I can …

Then maybe God won’t feel bad about letting me in heaven. Then maybe God won’t look at me everytime he sees me and wonder when I am going to give him something back.

Irrational, I know, but this is how I feel sometimes.

But being reconciled to God means becoming a part of his family, and despite how many families opperate, there is no fee for being a part of a family.

Maybe part of our inability to accept the love of God has been the inability of our own families to offer that love, unconditionally.

desperate for authentic connection

In a world where I am surrounded by strangers I long for meaningful connections. I long to be more than my job to those I meet.

I long to be myself but am always afraid that I will not be accepted.