Thawing out at Christianity 21

So I went to this thing called Christianity 21 this past weekend.  A lot of my friends joked that I should get away somewhere tropical with my husband since it was our 20^th wedding anniversary.  But no… this is what we chose.  A 3 day conference in Minneapolis about what we dreamed for Christianity in the 21^st century. This trip was no tropical paradise.

Believe me, I’ve come to expect the last place you’ll find the emotional equivalent to sand between your toes and Pina Coladas is a Christian conference.  Honestly,  I’ve been to many of them before and have found them to be rather “chilly”.  But here in Minneapolis amidst early warnings of snow (as a matter of fact it even snowed over Friday night)  I felt somehow thawed out.

I could first feel my toes moving when I heard the initial concept of the weekend.  There would be 21 speakers, all women who would speak for 21 minutes each. Yes, that piqued my interest, mostly because it wasn’t a women’s conference.  How refreshing for at least part of the Christian culture to proclaim women had something to say to everyone.  Something Jesus knew.

From theology to personal stories of faith to opinions of what church should be, these women brought it.   Each in their own way, they spoke of a God that welcomes change and a faith that transcends preconceived ideas.   Diana Butler Bass recounted the constant change that the church has undergone and how the church has always persevered.  With her example, “Protestantism didn’t kill Catholicism” maybe we can chip away at those frozen parts of guilt and fear of destruction and search on knowing that we are only adding to the understanding of this God we follow.

A God, I believe that can deal with our nagging questions because God purposely placed Godself within the human context of doubt and rejection and persecution and death.  As Debbie Blue said, “our stories are not stories that lift us out of our bodies, but stories that meet us there.”

So if God can meet us amidst all our unsavory humanness why can’t the church meet its people wherever they are?  And this is where the body thaws on the inside and the heart starts beating again.

Ah, to imagine a church as Seth Donovan says, “where it is less important to be right than to be loved.”  or a place that Alise Barymore described as “a church available to both the curious and committed.”

These people were speaking my language – thaw, thaw, thaw and  I didn’t perceive one secret handshake or whispered password.  That’s comforting for someone like me who has known the cold breeze of judgment when I somehow picked the wrong word, analogy or Bible passage when talking with other “religious people”.

But now I lay on this warm sandy beach of challenging theology amidst reflection of our Christian tradition and I felt I was not alone.

There are people grappling with the same issues I do and there are people who also feel compelled to do something about it.

In 2001 my husband Don and I  set out to start a church that was different from all the churches we had been to or visited.  We took our wacky step-sister of a service out of the conventional church we were in and planted it in a run down, under-funded community center not at all in the center of town.

There we attempted a church that was welcoming from the time you parked your car to the moment you left.  Not welcoming in a slick system or church logo’d polo shirt kind of way but welcoming because the community genuinely wanted you there.  You – no matter who you were, how you lived, what you thought, where you worked, what you looked like or who you hung out with.   We envisioned a place with a two-way conversation.  A place where we offer you food, talk with you and not talk at you.

We are not alone.

How warm the water is when you leave the frigid waters of accusation, piousness and code words. When you give in to the freedom to splash around and throw all that crap to the side of the water and discuss what it takes to make our churches a place of authentic community where people can be themselves, wrestle with their faith and bask in the warmth of God’s love.

Pina Colada anyone?

 

Throwing Baby (Jesus) out with the Bath Water

What I really love about bloging is that anyone can talk about all sorts of things in an open format. The other day I wrote about my reluctance to evangelize in the traditional sense because of the bad rap us Christians have been getting. Some of which I admit is deserved. Believe you me, this is an occupational hazard of mine.
Lulu, a reader of mine reminded me that evangelism comes from our actions not our words and it reminded me of the St. Francis quote “Preach the gospel at all times, use words when necessary.” Possibly my favorite Christian quote (if that is a thing).
Most of my life I’ve lived by that rule. I believe in doing. I’m one of those people who feels most close to God when I’m in the dirt – getting my hands dirty. But lately I feel called to proclaim his name. I’m not really sure why, just that I am. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t feel the need to convert people from other religions. I have a profound respect for other religions and have many friends that are not Christian.
But here it is straight out. As a Christian, I feel we’ve done Christ wrong. We’ve made his teachings inclusive and untouchable. We’ve made our Jesus part of a secret club that you need some kind of secret handshake to share his wisdom. I don’t think that’s done Christ any good. As a matter of fact I think it’s made people down right adversarial.
Over and over I hear people reading books that sound awfully Christian but are missing Christ. His teachings of love, forgiveness, abundance of life, victory over oppression all spelled out in the language of vague spirituality. Have we thrown Baby Jesus out with bath water? I wonder.

 

Bashful – The 13th Apostle

Lately I’ve been grappling with the whole idea of evangelism. The truth is I keep running into people who are down right adverserial when it comes to discussions about church or Christianity or even Jesus and that has made me more reluctant. As a matter of fact recently when I mention my devotion to Christ I keep getting interrupted by someone mentioning the latest self help book they read or better yet the most recent spiritual journey by someone who dropped out of their life for a year and traveled the globe writing an account of their spiritual escapades.

I think because I’m in ministry and work as the Director of Ministry and worship leader in a NY church people expect me to pounce on them and overload them with Christian talk. A language I just don’t speak. Nonetheless, I seem to encounter people that tell me exactly what they think I think as a Christian – before I even begin to talk about Jesus in my life.

Often the conversation becomes a rhetorical categorization of what Christians are, talk like and how they act rather than an expression of my experience as a follower of Christ.

I want to yell, “Would you be quite and listen while I tell you we are not all like that.” But I don’t. I control myself because the last thing I want to do is come off like the Christian bullies that some folks expect me to be.

I struggle with this because Jesus said not to deny him and because I just can not  do ministry without saying who I do it for?  What kind of church are we if we don’t proudly proclaim our discipleship to Christ?  What kind of Christian am I?

Paul says if you are looking for a way to measure how good you’re doing as a church and a Christian get out your resume of how many people have seen Christ through you and how many people have come to believe because you believe.

The more I give in to this bashful nature of mine the less of a disciple I am.

 

Cheers, you guys!

You know this beer with the President thing makes me wonder who I would want to sit down and have a beer with (or coffee for non-beer consumers)  It wouldn’t just be any beer the President would be there – moderating.  Just imagine if the President of the United States could moderate my beer with a person with which I  have had a difficult situation ?   We could sit together, on our best behavior and just talk it out.  I mean really, who in the right mind would be inappropriate first.  The President is watching.

But who would it be?  I could think of a bunch of people that I have had misunderstandings with or unfinished business or even hurt feelings.  Picking one would be difficult.  There’s that girl from 7th grade (will call her AS) that had an end of the year party and invited everyone in the class but me.  Still don’t know why.  There’s that lady at Motor Vehicle that I swear was trying to start a fight with me and there’s my father, who I have never been able to get through a conversation with without fighting.

I think I’m going to go with my father.  How about you?

 

What do we teach our kids

I’ve done a lot of thinking about whether I raise my kids according to my faith. It seems like it would be an easy thing to do but the culture keeps telling us that there is a better way. I’ll explain.
I signed my son up for recreational soccer in our town. After about 2 practices the coach calls a meeting of all the parents and tells us that her 8 year old son does not want to play any longer and therefore she does not want to coach the team.
She continues to say that as a professional teacher with a plethora of childhood developmental degrees she “knows” that it’s not right to “force” a child to do something they do not want to do.
I stood there feeling like I had been clobbered as she hurled her degrees at us. How was I going to explain to my son that there will be no soccer this season because the coach is quitting and no other parent stepped up. I knew I would have made a total mess of it having never been an athlete.
Still, I kept thinking DR. Mom is missing 2 very important components in all this – community and commitment. Is it really that bad to explain to our 8 year old that they made a commitment and should abide by it until the end of the season?
It reminded me of an article I read in a parenting magazine once. it said that if your older child is pushing your younger sibling off the slide you should resist stepping in so the younger child learns to defend himself.
Sure, I understand the importance of learning to defend yourself however what are we inadvertently teaching the older child? Are we saying you can be a bully while Mommy watches? Will they grow up thinking that behavior is ok until the smaller kid stands up for himself. This is completely against what jesus taught.
I had always known that Jesus’ message was counter cultural but I hadn’t realized how much until I became a mother. It has invaded every moment of everyday.

 

He Called his Child Jesus Cause He Likes the Name

A couple of days ago I played the song Levon for my 14 year old daughter. I know I’ve played it for her before. It is possibly one of my favorite songs and one made famous from my most favorite performer, Elton John. To my dismay every play through was greeted with a yawn like reception.
“How could she not LOVE this?” I thought. “My own flesh and blood.”
Until this day, driving along on the way to her piano lesson I slipped the CD in my car stereo. We listened to “Tiny Dancer” and then it came on. I saw her perk up. She became quite and just listened. When it was over she said, “Can I put this on again.”
I breathed such a ridiculous sigh of relief. Why in the world was it so important to me that my daughter appreciate this song?
Since that day she has been playing not only Levon but the whole album daily. I hear her blasting it from her bedroom just like me so many years before.
My favorite line bellowing once again throughout my house, “He calls his child Jesus “cause he likes the name.” I was a teenager when I first heard it. Once again the simultaneous irreverence and provocative brilliance of that Bernie Taupin line sticks in my mind just like it did as I sang it in my bedroom night after night so many years ago. Why name someone Jesus if it means nothing more than a name?
Years later I am still transfixed by that line and the story that surrounds it. A story of 3 generations of men all disillusioned by life but carrying on. However Jesus is always dreaming, always wanting more than the ordinary and pushing the conventional until it became extraordinary. Perhaps there was more to that name than Levon thought.
I wonder how many of us still think about lines from a song of our childhood and what it means? I would love to hear!

 

Brother can you spare a quarter

 

Today is my birthday.  Having a birthday in June is usually pretty pleasant.  I can’t remember the last time the sun didn’t shine on my birthday.  I woke up knowing that even though this was my day I would spend most of it helping out my parents.  My mom is suffering from joint damage in her foot due to her diabetes and my dad has severe dementia and is confined to a wheelchair.  Now, with my mom in a leg cast times are hard for them.  I have become their connection to the outside world until this cast on my mom’s leg is removed and she can drive again.  So I set out this rainy morning to their house to pick up her grocery list.

 

If I am honest with myself, I would admit that there are a multitude of other things I would rather be doing on my birthday.  But you know,  this day 48 years ago she did more work to get me here than I did so why not, right?

 

By the time I got to the Shoprite it was pouring and there was no sense in waiting, it seemed like it would go on forever.  So out of my car I dash to the metal cage area in the parking lot that houses the wagons.  When I got there I instantly realized that you need a quarter to detach the wagons from their chains insuring that you return it to get your quarter back.  Frantically I searched for a quarter knowing that I most likely wouldn’t’ find one because I had given every last quarter I had to my daughter before she got on the bus only hours ago.  Nonetheless I kept looking.

 

Out of the corning of my eye I see an old man crossing the parking lot with an empty wagon.  I noticed him because he reminded me of my father.  He was wearing a quilted flannel jacket and a blue baseball cap that covered most of his white gray hair.  As he got closer he appeared to be about the same age – mid eighties or so.  He shuffled just like my dad used to before the dementia make walking impossible.  Still digging through my purse I watched him walk past caged carts and minivans.  I began to get the impression he was heading for me.

 

Slowly he shuffled across the lane I was standing in.  Soon, he was met by a small white sedan, driven by a grey-haired woman.  

 

“Did you forget something?”  He leaned over, meeting my eyes with his from beneath his #1 Grandfather cap.

 

“Yes, I don’t usually shop here and I forgot all about the quarters”.

 

“Take my cart.”  He said.

 

“Oh, well,  let me find a quarter for you.  I must have one” I responded continuing to search through my purse. All the while, I was in disbelief that this elderly man had crossed an entire parking lot in the pouring rain to give me his cart.

 

“No.  Don’t worry about it honey.  You’ll pay me back some day.”  With that he got in the white sedan with his lady and she drove away.

 

He made me cry.  I don’t know why.  Perhaps because I couldn’t imagine how I could ever pay him back.

 

When my daughter came home from school I told her the story and she said to me, “Mom, I don’t think he meant the quarter.”

 

“Me neither,” I replied.

 

Can we forgive ourselves or do we need divine intervention?

Why is it so hard to let go of the words floating around in our heads. You know the ones I mean. The ones that represent mistakes we made so many years ago. I remember when I was a young adult I had a friend who held on to a great deal of shame and self blame in her life. She told me that she knew deep down inside that she needed to forgive herself to ever have a happy normal life but she just couldn’t do it. She told me, “Every time I try I have this conversation in my head I end up reliving the whole situation, all the facts come up in my mind, the why’s and the why nots, the pain and the blame. I begin to think “I wouldn’t have done this if they hadn’t done that. I just can’t seem to let it go.”
Learning to forgive herself had taken on the same untouchable desire as learning to love herself. Both things she thought she was failing at miserably.
And isn’t funny I said to her that the often people in your life are more willing to forgive you and you can forgive them easer than we can forgive ourselves. Wouldn’t it be great if we could just take ourselves out of the equation? We are our own worst enemies aren’t we?
I can blow off something someone does to me much easier than I can stop being made at myself for something I shouldn’t have done. I have come to realize I just don’t have the power. I guess I realized at some point in my life that I needed divine intervention. Asking God’s forgiveness is the same as asking God to relive you of the burden of your own mistakes. Your saying I can’t make this go away on my own.
The important thing is that even if you never get to the point where you forgive yourself, God forgives you. The past is gone there is nothing left to hold on to. The only stipulation with God’s forgiveness is that you forgive others.

 

Thoughts on Forgiveness – Pt. 1

One evening about 10 years ago, I was at a wedding. I didn’t know the family that well and was seated at a table with people I didn’t know either. Sometimes that can be a disaster but this time it was actually a lot of fun. I found myself with two women, Ella and Grace who were very friendly. I would say they both seemed to have been in their 70’s. They were best friends and you could tell. They finished each other’s sentences and looked at each other knowingly when the band played a certain song like the same memory had come to both of them.
I found myself asking them a lot of questions about where they grew up and their friendship in particular. They told me how they met when they were very young and how they enjoyed playing at each other’s houses even though their families were very different. Elle was the daughter of Italian immigrants and Grace’s family was German. They recalled discovering different types of foods and each others homes, skipping school to see Frank Sinatra and double dating.
As the conversation proceeded they started to tell me a story in which one of them hurt the other very badly and they didn’t talk for 20 years. They were both in their early 20s at the time and both planning to be married. Ella had set her date and was happily making her wedding plans that included Grace as her Maid of Honor. Everything was going on nicely until Grace chose the day for her wedding. She picked the Weekend before Elle’s, which meant she would be on her Honeymoon and unavailable to participate in Elle’s wedding. Elle was devastated. She told Grace she would not be in her wedding either. Feeling hurt and rejected Elle did not call Grace again and Grace feeling misunderstood and hurt herself knew her call wouldn’t be wanted. That began 20 years of avoiding each other. They each thought the relationship would never be the same.
Elle said, “After time went by I wasn’t even mad anymore, we had just become the two friends that weren’t talking”. They talked about how much they missed of each other’s lives. Grace told me, “How stupid that we missed the births of each others children.”
I asked how did you end up friends again? If you saw them that night you would never belief they had ever been separated. Together they told me about how they ran into each other at a restaurant. A mutual friend was there, saw them and quickly grabbed them each and said, “Now – in the bathroom!” They told me they cried and and talked and laughed. And cried and talked and laughed. Elle giggled, “When we were done crying we each put fake beauty marks in the same spot on our faces to see if our husbands would notice when we returned to our table. Our husbands thought we were crazy! Just like they used too. It was like nothing had changed.

 

Cheers to Susan Boyle

Like a few hundred million people I had the pleasure of listening to Susan Boyle via Youtube when my husband sent me the link yesterday. For days now I keep hearing her name repeated on TV, over my facebook and in personal conversations and when I do I find myself searching out that e-mail and re-clicking the link to listen again.

It’s moments like this that flood my mind with so many thoughts that I don’t know if I can write a simple post about it. Yes, the striking thing in the video is the initial response of the audience. It strongly confirms the quick judgment of our society. This media imposed belief that somehow what you look like has anything to do with what you are capable of.

After being hit in the head with that first impression, I am left with a lot more to think about when I watch this. I am completely thrilled that the audience quickly understood what they were witnessing. I think as a society we are handed images all the time and told that they are desirable whether they truly are or not. But this day the crowded room acknowledged authenticity over marketing.

There are people who find themselves singing for the masses who are packaged products of an entertainment industry based on good looks and profitability and then there are the Susan Boyles of the world who have no other choice but to sing. They sing because they were made to sing. They sing because they know what they have to offer more than we do. God endowed her and others with gifts without concern over our imposed marketing strategies. Thank God that when people have the courage to defy the odds, we still respond. I hope the know-it-all marketers and corporate movers and shakers have the courage to listen, really listen to Susan and her gleeful audience.

This clip is a hopeful message for me. It means we are not as dulled to real beauty as I thought. In a world of heavily marketing overly processed people, places and things we still cheer at what is authentic and natural and truly beautiful.