Not a Poor Excuse

Four years ago I reflected on the part we were playing in Mexico.  Caring for the poor was one of those reasons: “While Mexico has an influential upper class and a growing middle class, God has also put it into our hearts to proclaim good news to the poor.  We believe that when we spend ourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed our light will rise in the darkness.”  (Matthew 11:4-5; Isaiah 58:10-11)

Today I was reminded of the “advantages” of being poor by Monika Hellwig:

1.   The poor know they are in urgent need of redemption.

2.   The poor know not only their dependence on God and on powerful people but also their interdependence with one another.

3.   The poor rest their security not on things but on people.

4.   The poor have no exaggerated sense of their own importance, and no exaggerated need of privacy.

5.   The poor expect little from competition and much from cooperation.

6.   The poor can distinguish between necessities and luxuries.

7.   The poor can wait, because they have acquired a kind of dogged patience born of acknowledged dependence.

8.   The fears of the poor are more realistic and less exaggerated, because they already know that one can survive great suffering and want.

9.   When the poor have the Gospel preached to them, it sounds like good news and not like a threat or a scolding.

10.  The poor can respond to the call of the Gospel with a certain abandonment and uncomplicated totality because they have so little to lose and are ready for anything. 

Endangered Species

“Silence is an endangered species…real quiet [is] not an absence of sound, but an absence of noise.”  Those thoughts are from Gordon Hempton an acoustic ecologist who has circled the globe three times over the last 30 years in pursuit of Earth’s rarest nature sounds. He goes on to say that quiet is a “think tank of the soul."  I think he is on to something there. 

A few years ago Maria and I sat in Mexico watching a film series that explores the world from the perspective of Jesus.  The particular one we were watching that evening considered noise in our lives.  A couple of minutes into the discussion everything went blank, and in silence questions scrolled across the screen:  “Why is silence so hard to deal with?  Do you have a cell phone?  Do you have a TV?  More than one TV?  Do you have a radio on all day?  Do you wish God’s voice would be louder in your life?  Is there a connection between the amount of noise in our lives and our inability to hear God?  Then Moses and the priests, who are Levites, said to all Israel, ‘Be silent, Oh Israel, and listen!’ (Deuteronomy 27:9) Search your hearts and be silent. (Psalm 4:4)  But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed. (Luke 5:16)  When was the last time you were in a solitary place?  Does my schedule, my time, my life look like that of a person who wants to hear God’s voice?  Maybe the healing and guidance we desperately need is not going to come from one more meeting or therapy session or sermon or self-help book but from simply listening for the voice of God.”

Ouch from Nietzsche

Hanging in the Teen Center for years was a group photo of a mission trip we took to New York City in the summer of 1990. Above our heads sprawled in graffiti lettering was the slogan, “God is Dead.” We had driven by it every day as we returned home after a children’s program in the park. While I hadn’t noticed it myself, the teens had and were adamant that we have our photo taken under it. I suppose it was their way of saying, “No, He isn’t, and we are living proof.” 
 

 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher who popularized the “God is Dead” idea in the late 1800’s. He wrote on religion, morality, contemporary culture and philosophy. Existentialism and postmodernism continue to be impacted by his teaching as he radically questioned the value and objectivity of truth.

 It’s interesting how insight can be gleaned from someone as atheistic and as bent against God as Nietzsche. Once he approached a group of Christians with this reprimand, “Yuck, you make me sick.” Some in the group asked him why to which he responded, “Because you redeemed don’t look like the redeemed. You’re as fearful, guilt-ridden, anxious, confused and adrift in an alien environment as I am. I’m allowed. I don’t believe. I have nothing to hope for. But you people claim you have a Savior. Why don’t you look like you are saved?”

Ouch!

Opening the Door to Community

The need to open the door to spiritual community has been on my mind for a good while now.  While I think it is a vital cog in how God shapes our lives, I haven’t been able to get a handle on a definition or list its key dynamics.   A new book provided some clarity the other day – Becoming a True Spiritual Community: A Profound Vision of What the Church Can Be by Larry Crabb.

 “Brokenness is a condition, one that is always there, inside, beneath the surface, carefully hidden for as long as we can keep a façade in place.  We live in brokenness.  We just don’t always see it, either in ourselves or in others.  A central task of community is to create a place that is safe enough for walls to be torn down, safe enough for each of us to own and reveal our brokenness.  We’re all struggling.  Beneath the surface of every personality – even the one that seems most ‘together’ – a spiritual battle is raging that will only be won with the help of community.

 “I propose thinking of a healing community as providing two kinds of relationships: spiritual friendship, which exists among spiritually minded peers who share their lives together, and spiritual direction, which takes place when time is specially set aside for one person to present his or her life to a respected (not always familiar) person who agrees to listen, pray, think and speak…”

 The four messages communicated within our spiritual community:

1.   “We accept you – we celebrate your purity in Christ, as we worship God.

2.   We believe in you – we envision your identity in Christ and what you can become as we trust God.

3.   We see you and are glad to stay involved – we discern your good passions and delight in them; we discern your bad passions and know they do not define you, as we ourselves continue to grow in Christ.

4.   We give to you – we apply no pressure to change you.  The power to change is already in you.  We give you what is most alive in us with the prayer that it will set you free to indulge your deepest desires, as we eagerly obey God.” 

 How about you…have you found an open door to this kind of spiritual community?