The Repo man

The re-po man

who came for my innocence

hammered on my door

at 2 A.M.

 

I asked him

if he came at this hour

because

it was the time of day that whatever happened, it still felt like a dream.

 

I don’t think he heard me.

He took my innocence away.

And he said a thing

I new surely he said to everyone.

 

“I’m sure this is just some kind of mistake.

You call your dealer tomorrow.

And work it all out.

I bet you’ll have your innocence back in no time.”

 

It was a strange thing for a man to say,

who wore a ketchup-stained tank top…

whose beer belly interposed itself between us

like a whole other presence.

 

I felt absurdly thankful to the man

for his token attempt at comforting me.

 

The thing I never realized

was that innocence was this anchor

that my hope used to be anchored to.

The next day, my hope floated away.

 

I guess my hope was maybe a cloud.

I discovered that it had always watered my joy.

Because, when it was gone,

my joy shriveled up and died.

 

I am trying, now

to talk my faith back in off the ledge.

“What’s the point of it all” it asks

“What’s the point of it all.”

There was a time…

There are so few things that really matter… and those few things that do matter, they are so very valuable.

We all carry these collections of preciousness.  Those moments when everything just slips into place.  Those times which justify the rest of our existence.

It doesn’t even make sense to do an accounting.  When you are in the middle of the sublime, you can’t quantify it’s value and see if all the hard times were worth it.   The quality of the thing is a bit like the time spent.

You could record and calculate how long the hard times were.  You could express this in days or weeks or months or years or miliseconds.

But those perfect times?  They happen according to God’s schedule, and in God’s time.  God’s time is flipped vertically, it doesn’t stretch out, it doesn’t register on our little clocks.  Eternity is the collection of all the seconds that will ever be.  But it is also potentially within every second, if we spend those seconds in the right ways.

I am painfully aware right now that there are some things which I have never spoken aloud.  There are some things which no one ever knows.  I am not thinking about great skeletons lurking in my closet.  I’m not even thinking of great times of rejoicing.  I am thinking of things that are so little, but not unimportant.  Things I could hardly put words to.

Sometimes I wish to share my life as if it were a story.  Right now, I wish to share a list.  It’s not exactly that the members of this list are unconnected.  It’s more than they are united through the fact that it is me that has experienced them.

I wish to write for pages and pages and pages, for hours and hours.  It would read like a song, it would read like a love letter.  I want to tell the world, “There was a time that this happened, and that happenened, and this happened.”  I want to tell you that it was good, that the world can be so good.

There is narcisism in there, I know that there is.  But at the same time, I want to know your list.  I want to know it desperately and intimately.  I will begin.  Perhaps you’ll be motivated to follow. 

 

There was a time when I lay on the floor of the bedroom of one of my dearest friends in the world.   The third member of our trio was there, too.  Our heads were touching I think.  And the Indigo Girls were playing on the radio.

There was a time when my youngest child wasn’t a day old.  And it was snowing on the roof tops.  My wife– his mother– was finally asleep.

There was a time when my oldest child was only five.  We sat on the front steps of our modest little apartment in Long Beach.  We sipped on hot apple ciders with caramel.   And we watched the sun go down.

There was a time that the boy closed the book when he finished reading it.  It was a Dr. Suess book.  He was seventeen.  It was the first book he ever read, cover to cover.  He was a tough kid, a gang kid.  But he closed that book and he smiled at me.

Would you share some of yours?  Please?  I’ll start.  “There was a time…”

My Moment of Surrender

There is so much interesting stuff going on, spiritually, on the new U2 C.D.  “Moment of Surrender” might be my favorite song on it, and most of the major themes of the whole C.D. seem to be present on that particular song.  I figured I’d give a shot to unpacking what I think maybe Bono meant.  The whole song is posted, uninterrupted, at the bottom of this post.

(I’m assuming 2 things, here.  The first is that these views aren’t necessarily Bono’s views; it’s a mistake to assume the speaker in a poem or a song is the same person as the writer of the poem or the song.  The second is that these lyrics do in fact mean something.)

Verse 1:

The only change is that 2nd line.  It leaves me thinking that it must be important: Vision over visibility.  After thinking about it, I’ve decided it must be another double-meaning kind-of thing.

On the one hand, vision over visibility means we’re no longer wanting everybody to notice us; (visibility) we’re wanting to see things the way they are (vision.)  On the other hand, it also means we’d rather be graced with religious visions rather than mere visibility, or seeing.

In addition to the relationship between sexuality and spirituality, the themes that seem to be wrestled with through out the C.D. is finding God in the every day, and even in the middle of pain and loss and despair, and trying to work out just how community connects to God.

If you just want to see Bono’s amazing lyrics uninterrupted by my feeble attempts at thinking too hard, they are below:

Moment Of Surrender

I tied myself with wire
To let the horses run free
Playing with the fire
Until the fire played with me

The stone was semi-precious
We were barely conscious
Two souls too cool to be
In the realm of certainty
Even on our wedding day

We set ourselves on fire
Oh God, do not deny her
It’s not if I believe in love
But if love believes in me
Oh, believe in me

At the moment of surrender
I folded to my knees
I did not notice the passers-by
And they did not notice me

I’ve been in every black hole
At the altar of the dark star
My body’s now a begging bowl
That’s begging to get back, begging to get back
To my heart
To the rhythm of my soul
To the rhythm of my unconsciousness
To the rhythm that yearns
To be released from control

I was punching in the numbers at the ATM machine
I could see in the reflection
A face staring back at me
At the moment of surrender
Of vision over visibility
I did not notice the passers-by
And they did not notice me

I was speeding on the subway
Through the stations of the cross
Every eye looking every other way
Counting down ’til the pentecost

At the moment of surrender
Of vision of over visibility
I did not notice the passers-by
And they did not notice me

I tied myself with wire
To let the horses run free
Playing with the fire
Until the fire played with me

Is the idea here that the guy in the son was looking for freedom but found himself enslaved?  Are the horses and fire about our animlastic urges?

When we let these things free, when we live our way, we tie ourselves up, we get burned by the fire, even though we thought we playing with them.  That first verse gives me this idea that there was a guy who just lived the way he wanted to live.  Maybe not a bad guy, just a guy who does what he wants to do when he wants to do it.

Verse 2:
The stone was semi-precious
We were barely conscious
Two souls too cool to be
In the realm of certainty
Even on our wedding day

And so the guy gets married.  He doesn’t fully understand what he’s doing.  He’s not even sure that marriage is an absolute.  But it seems like the thing to do.

(A caveat: the guy that I’m imagining is basically me.  So maybe I’m just projecting.  Maybe this isn’t in the song at all.)

Verse 3:
We set ourselves on fire
Oh God, do not deny her
It’s not if I believe in love
But if love believes in me
Oh, believe in me

Interesting that fire comes up again.  In general, fire is a thing which is necessary but quickly gets out of control.  Biblically, fire is often used for purifying, but is also a symbol of God, as in the burning bush.

And so in this verse, it seems like there’s some realization.  The world is bigger than it seems, perhaps.  Marriage isn’t some casual thing.  Perhaps the idea is that through our animal instincts  is the way that this can come. 

(This is a trait that cuts across many of U2 songs: the idea that we can get  a glimpse of God in sex.  Sometimes, the idea almost seems like we get a sort-of redemption through this.  While I wouldn’t want to make that claim– which was very much held by the Romantics of centuries past, which also gets manifested in lots of works by folks like Nine Inch Nails– I also am unsure whether Bono would agree with this claim or would simply get that it’s a tempting thing to believe.)

At any rate, it seems like the person in this song is confronted with a new reality.   There’s so very much in those last couple lines:  

It’s not if I believe in love
But if love believes in me
Oh, believe in me

Again, perhaps this is all just projection.  But once, I thought the important question was: Do I believe in Love?  And what this really meant was, Is there more than just the rush of hormones associated with chasing after sex?

When I began to see that we are bigger than our chemical highs, when I began to suspect that there was something greater at work in the creation of sex, it became a radically different question.

The question was: If something bigger– way bigger– than natural forces was at work, what does this force think about me?

And perhaps it’s that way for the guy in the song: through a marriage he stumbled into, he begins to see that there is a God.  The question of how this God feels about him is quite an important one.

Next Verse:
At the moment of surrender
I folded to my knees
I did not notice the passers-by
And they did not notice me

And so suddently he is pulled out of the world he has always inhabited.  He realizes that there is something bigger than what people think of him.  He realizes that if this thing is as big as it seems, submitting to it is the only appropirate response.

Firsr Half of the Next Verse:
I’ve been in every black hole
At the altar of the dark star
My body’s now a begging bowl
That’s begging to get back, begging to get back

Before that moment of surrender, the guy was dwarfed by the hugeness of the universe, by the insignificance of our humanity if scientific explanations are the full story.

Verse continues:
To my heart
To the rhythm of my soul
To the rhythm of my unconsciousness
To the rhythm that yearns
To be released from control

Deep inside, he always knew that those explanations, they weren’t right.  That way of living was wrong.  Partially because that way of living meant being in charge and we are made to surrender.

Next verse:
I was punching in the numbers at the ATM machine
I could see in the reflection
A face staring back at me
At the moment of surrender
Of vision over visibility
I did not notice the passers-by
And they did not notice me

And so in the mundane realities of every day life, the guy continues to see this whole other world, a more important one.

 

Next Verse:
I was speeding on the subway
Through the stations of the cross
Every eye looking every other way
Counting down ’til the pentecost

I struggled with this verse for a while.  Because at first, it seemed like the last line applied to every body.  But if the guy on the subway is the one counting down to the pentecost, it makes a lot more sense.

Nearly everybody else doesn’t see the world as he does.  Nearly everybody else in the world doesn’t recognize that we’re all supposed to be traveling through the stations of the cross.  (I love the play on words: Subway stations/stations of the cross)  Even in this transformed life, it’s not easy.  But we can look to a time where we are transformed, just as the disciples were at the first pentecost.

Next moment:
At the moment of surrender
Of vision of over visibility
I did not notice the passers-by
And they did not notice me

What are You Afraid of?

What are you afraid of?

I don’t mean that as a mere rhetorical device.  I mean it quite seriously:

What are you afraid of?  What’s the worst thing that could possibly happen to you?  To your family?  To your nation?  To your workplace?  To your way of life?

I’m trying to put words to this truth about the things we fear.  It’s the flip side of the idea that perfect love drives away our fear.  It’s the reality that anything short of perfect love will be tinged by our fears.  And our fears are our undoing.

On some level, it’s impossible to fear something that is wholly outside of us.  On some level, fears don’t exist on the level of the abstract.  Whatever we fear, it’s really about how the feared thing will impact us.

I’d go even further.  We delude ourselves into thinking that problems are outside of us.  But they are not.  Not really.  Not ever.

It began with Eve, Adam, a garden and a snake.

And it’s easy to say “The garden was outside of them.  The snake was outside of them.”

But the garden and the snake weren’t the problem.  The reactions of Adam and Eve, these were the problem.

Left unchecked, fear drives us to become the very thing we so feared.  The Old Testament tells the story of Josea and Gomer.   It’s the story of a women who so feared being hemmed in and trapped that she embrarks on a journey that ends when she sells herself into slavery.

And consider Joseph’s brothers.  It was clear that the youngest brother was to have power within the family.  It was power that they didn’t want to share.  And so they set into motion a series of events which culminates in Joseph become one of the most powerful people in the world; it culuminates in the brothers being wholly and utterly under Joseph’s control.   It’s hard to imagine how Joseph could have ended up anywhere near as influential, if his brothers hadn’t feared his power.  They made Joseph that way.

And then: Consider the fear of the Romans that was had by the people at Jesus’ time.

I’m not casting stones, particularly here.  If I had lived at the time, I know I would have had good reasons to fear them as well.

But I can only imagine how it seemed to the people who were crucifying Jesus.  The Romans must have thought, “Yeah, these guys seem all gung-ho for Jesus as he enters into the city.  But that one guy, Judas, he turns Jesus over.  Pontius gives them a chance to set him free, but the crowd goes for the murderer instead.”

They began with this fear of the Romans.  And in selling Jesus out, they increased the power and sway the Romans had.  After the crucifiction of Jesus, the Romans must have rested easier.  Their consciences must have been assuaged.  There must have been a sense of “See?  We’re doing the right thing.  This rabble actually needs us.”

I think I have some more to say on this topic.  But not today.

What do you fear?  If left unchecked, what could this fear do to you?

No Line…

One of the best parts of the last several days has been immersing myself in the new-ish U2 C.D., No Line on the Horizon.  It is amazing.

The jangle-jangle-jangle of the bass, the often sparse instrumentation, the use of harmonies in the vocals, the painos popping up at songs’ end… it all harkens back to U2 before The Joshua Tree. 

But it’s grown up, too.  Listening to it feels a bit like I’ve had this friend for years.   Though we have this really solid friendship we actually haven’t talked about some important issues in forever.  

This C.D. feels like returning to some conversational topic from long ago.  We’re still the same people, we still have some of the same things to say to each other, but we’re both grown up, some.  We own more of our own opinions.  We’re not as likely to slip into the oversimplicity of youth.  But at our core, we’re still the same people.  And I had no idea how much I had missed discussing this stuff with that old friend.

One of the elements I’ve most enjoyed being challenged by is the spiritual stuff.  When I fell in love with U2 I wasn’t a Christian.  When I became one this whole new vista opened up for me.

I remember the first time I heard “I still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” After accepting Christ.  When I heard this part I was so moved I almost had to pull over:

I believe in the Kingdom Come
Then all the colours will bleed into one
Bleed into one.
But yes, I’m still running.

You broke the bonds
And you loosed the chains
Carried the cross of my shame
Oh my shame, you know I believe it.

But I still haven’t found
What I’m looking for.
But I still haven’t found
What I’m looking for.

There’s fodder in the lyrics of the new C.D.’s for bunches of blog postings.  But I’m not quite ready yet. 

Are you a U2 fan?  What do you think of the new C.D?  What are your thoughts about the spirituality expressed through the music?

Strategy? Or Manipulation?

I’ve been exploring questions of community and church.   Over the last week I’ve tried to adress two important questions connected to community.  Today, I’ll adress the third. 

That question is “What is the role of strategy in building community in the church?”

I think this question further breaks down into 2 questions, which I’ll adress seperately in this post:

A) Isn’t being strategic really being manipulative? 

B) How important is the specific strategy that Fellowship Church has chosen?

First question first:

I’m open to the possibility that being strategic could mean being manipulative.  It seems like there must be something about the point at which you’re decieving people is the point at which it becomes manipulative.

The thing I don’t quite get, though, is that somehow, the only people who have to justify themselves in this area are the people who talk and think about what they are going to do.  The bottom line is that everybody has a way of doing things. 

I hope you’ll forgive the fact that I’m doing the annoying church-y thing of starting each of these with the same letters.  But what it comes down to is this:

We can be stupid, we can be stubborn, or we can be strategic.  Perhaps I’m slanting each of these by my word choice.   Maybe it would be nicer if I said we can be random, we can be traditional, or we can have logical reasons for doing what we’re doing.  

Ultimately, though, we choose whether we’re going to be traditional, random, or have logical reasons.

And I would say if your randomness or if your tradition are getting you what you want, you ought to keep going in that direction.  My point is that this is still a decision.

People often say “I listen to the Holy Spirit.  That’s what guides me.  It’s not tradition.  It’s not randomness.  It’s not strategic thinking.”

I think this is true.  I think sometimes the church ought to make decisions that appear foolish.  I think that we ought to be open to the Holy Spirit’s prompting.

Here’s a problem, though, and I hope you’ll forgive me  if this sounds accusatory:

As a general rule, most people are very excited to ask others to submit to what they believe the Holy Spirit is prompting them to do.  Often times, the very people who believe  most in this idea are the least likely to submit when the Holy Spirit is telling some one us to do something.

In short, it seems to me that people who believe that the Holy Spirit frequently guides us in directions that aren’t strategic, often times these people believe the we ought to listen to these people, and not other people, about just what we ought to do. 

I’m so thankful that God is a God of order, logic, and rationality.  I am so very thankful that many times  the Holy Spirit’s promptings are justifiable in terms of logic and rationality. 

I would submit that The Holy Spirit’s promptings are cultivatived in a culture which is carefully exploring the rationale and reasons for what it does.

The other subquestion is: How important is Fellowship Church’s specific strategy?

Leading people into a growing relationship with Jesus is the point.  Community is the best way to get there.  We’re building community in the best way that we know how for the time and place we exist in.

A really great guy who attended our church was not attending a small group.  He said to somebody “Look, I’m not going to do something just because everybody else is.  My small group is this weekly gathering of men at Finders.  My small group is my friendship with Pastor Marty.  I don’t need to show up at the time I’m told and the place I’m told.”

He’s not wrong.   If he’s careful.

His argument isn’t altogether different from somebody who says “Look, I don’t need to go to church.  I can worship God in the forest, I should be worshipping him all the time, right?  Why limit myself to just once a week?”

My answer is that church doesn’t set an upper limit on worship– it sets a lower limit.  Similarly, small group doesn’t limit people into being in only one community.  But it does guarentee that the person is in atleast one community.

A person who thinks the forest is a better place to worship than church, he is likely to start with the best of intentions.  But I think it’s pretty easy for him to get off-track, and not worship at all.

And a person who isn’t intentional about community, I think it’s easy for him to drift from belonging to showing up to a group, to not showing up at all.

Our implementation of community is not perfect.  It’s somewhat relative to our culture.  But it is one valid way to reach the goal of community.  And the scary-dangerous things is that there are lots of imposters to community, lots of ways we can delude ourselves…

And while the specific form of community is a bit up-for-grabs, for my money, the goal of community in general is not up-for-grabs.  It is an essential.

A re-envisioning of a story from scripture

Now, there was a man who was a man of the religious establishment named Nicodemus, a pastor on staff at a nearby megachurch. He came to see Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him.”

In reply, Jesus declared, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he reboots his life.”

“How can a person reboot his life?” Nicodemus asked. “I can reboot a computer, but certainly I could not reboot my life!”

Jesus answered, “I tell you the truth, no one can participate in the world God is planning for unless he reboots his life with an entirely new operating system. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must reboot your life’. You don’t understand the inner workings of your computer, yet you are still able to follow the instructions in the manual. So it is with everyone who has rebooted their lives with a new operating system.”

“How can this be?” Nicodemus asked.

“You stand on that pulpit before thousands of people ever week end.” Said Jesus “and you do not understand these things? I tell you the truth, we speak of what we know and we testify to what we have have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. I have put this in terms from your every day life and you can’t wrap your brain around it; how then will you will believe if I tell it like it is and drop the metaphors? No one has ever experienced this except for the person who started there in the first place, and the only way you ever will is if that person is lifted up to save everyone from certain death.”

Is Community Optional?

The last couple weeks, I’ve found myself involved with a number of conversations that were quite similiar.  Each of them was really about community, and the role of the church in cultivating community.

(Church here meaning both the global church in general and Fellowship Church in particular.)

I identified three questions that were worth looking at.  The one I’m focused on today:

Is community optional?

I think the answer to that question is “No.”

In one of the conversations I’ve had about community, the other person said, essentially, that they felt like a community-oriented church is o.k.  for people who are into community.  But they suggested that others might prefer a church that wasn’t focused on community.  Perhaps they’d be into a “Spirit-filled” church.  Maybe they’d prefer a church which was more doctrinally-driven.

First off, I think that The Holy Spirit works through community and lives in the space between them.  Secondly, I think that one of the most important doctrines a church can have is an emphasis on community.  Therefore, either a community-focused church will be spirit filled and a doctrinally based church must emphasize community.

I am not saying that every church should be like my church in most ways.  There are countless negotiable aspects of a church.  I would go so far as to suggest that there is more solid scriptural support for the importance of community than there is for having music at all in a worship service.  I would go so far as to say that there is more solid scriptural support for the importance of community than there is for the idea that a church ought to have a building, than there is for the idea that a service ought to fit the music-sermon-music/offering format.    I bet I’m going to make some people mad on this one, but I’ve even say you have to work harder to find the notion of the trinity in the bible than you do to find the importance of community.

I am not saying that scripture does not support any of the above ideas, particularly the trinity.  I am saying that the evidence seems more clear and plain for the importance of community.

I am also not saying that community is all a church needs.  But it’s almost all.  I haven’t studied this question, but tenatively, I would venture the position that worship of God, recognition that Christ rose from the grave, and community are the only true essentials for a group to be called a church.

I would submit that you can’t have love without community, and that you can’t have community with out love.  If I’m right on this, then some of the support I’d offer for the importance of community follow:

* Jesus saying that the most important thing is love of God and love of neighbor.

* Jesus saying that by our love they show know us.

* Paul saying that speaking in every language, prophesying, understanding everything, these are essentially meaningless without love.

I think it’d be easy to find verses that discuss the importance of other things.  I think it’d be quite difficult to point to verses that establish other things as more important than love.

Blessings, oppurtunities, and gifts

One of the things we do at FC is create a worship environment before the service for our volunteers who would otherwise miss out.  We sing a couple songs and share a few words, generally these words are a shortened version of the sermon.  Once a month, I’m the speaker dude for this.

Currently, rather than taking a shortened version of the sermon we’re focusing on chapters of Bill Hybels’ Axion.  The title of my chapter is: Explosive Growth Means Dramatic Meltdowns. 

The idea is that often times we pray for God to do amazing things, and often times we’re not prepared for what happens when God delivers these prayers.  He gives examples about churches who prayed for growth and had these prayers answered.  And when people began showing up, they didn’t have enough parking spaces, volunteers, etc., to handle the influx.

As I pondered this statement, and I prayed about what it means to our volunteers– who may not be directly involved in big–picture questions around church growth– I realized something.

I don’t know if I’m struck by this realization because it’s so obvious that I should have noticed it before.  For whatever it’s worth, the realization is this:

God is much more likely to bless us with oppurtunities than he is to bless us with gifts.

Oppurtunities are possibilities that we have to work on in order to achieve their full potential.  Gifts are neatly wrapped, self-complete packages that we can enjoy the fruits of without doing much about.

I have the oppurtunity to speak to our volunteers this morning.  This is an oppurtunity because it only becomes something good if I do a little work to prepare.  On the other hand, I might recieve a gift of an iced soy mocha.  All I would have to do is drink this right up.

Gifts are easier.  But they don’t grow us.  This is probably why God doesn’t often give them to us.  He gives us oppurtunities instead.

In that particular chapter, Hybels quotes acts 2:47.  This is a verse about the early church.  It says that the Lord “added to their number daily those who were being saved.”  Interestingly, though, if you read the earlier portions of the chapter, you find the disciples have been working hard and practicing obedience.

God could have wiped the Egyptians off the face of the planet.  He could have erased all the people who came to live in Israel.  He could have teleported his people straight from slavery and into the promised land.  If he had done these things, he would have given them a gift.  But what he gave them was an oppurtunity.  They had to leave their slavemasters.  They had to follow behind God.  They had to make their own home among hostile peoples.

And so it seems like one of the ways this applies to us is that so often we pray expecting gifts from God.  But instead, what he blesses us with are oppurtunities.  We partner with God.  A pretty amazing thing.

Coming home

You asked why I came back here.

And it’s hard for me to explain it to you.

 

I want to tell you that in all the important ways

I never left at all.

But you know the lie in that truth:

physically, I was gone for so long.

 

I want to tell you that I came back

because I was tired of living a half-life in a limbo away

and this, perhaps, is closer to the truth.

 

I want to tell you

that I wanted to lose my citzenship here.

I tried so hard. 

But it’s not like I can just tear up a passport.

I want to tell you that,

but I’m not sure if you will know how to take it.

 

Don’t you see that I tried to leave?

It’s not so much that this place kept calling to me.

But more,

that I kept calling to this place.

Even though I did not want to.

 

I want to explain that home,

home is the basis for our comparisons.

It is the place that all our default settings are etablished.

It is the place where we know the smell of the air before the rain.

It is the place where milk tastes right…

 

All the chocolate chip cookies I have ever eaten,

 they will forever be compared to the archetypal cookies of home.

 

During the season change I wanted to take the place on its own terms.

When people spoke I wanted to not notice the accents anymore.

I wanted that same look in my eye that they all had as they passed eachother on the street.

But they never came.

 

Some people find a new home somewhere else.

I found a new home back where I started from.