Discipleship

During the years I taught undergraduate ministry students, I encountered what I consider to be a common misunderstanding of an essential component of imitating Christ. Nothing is more basic to following Jesus Christ than obeying his demand for self-denial and cross carrying.  But What exactly did Jesus mean when he instructed his disciples to deny themselves? What, in truth, did Jesus have in mind when he established this seemingly counter-intuitve prerequisite for discpleship? Perhaps by default, the frequent interpretation communicated to young people in our churches is that self-denial equates to self-rejection. Somehow we confuse denying self with ignoring or at least avoiding self-understanding.  The difference is colossal, since knowing one's self is paramount to obeying Christ's command in Mark 8:34.  Daily denying of self invokes an ongoing process of self-discovery, for only by embracing the way God has fashioned me am I then ready to relinquish all that I am to Christ.  To pose this as a question, how can I offer to Christ what I'm unaware is mine to give? Such a scenario would be more akin to hypnosis rather than surrender. In other words, 'DNA' does not stand for "Do not ask." The more that I acknowledge my God-granted uniqueness, the better able I am to parlay that uniqueness into Christ-honoring service.

Tugboats and Christ

Jo and I stole away to Louisiana this weekend for a few days of genealogical research and rose rustling (taking cuttings from antique roses in order to try and transplant them in our own garden back in Bosqueville), and since we couldn't find a place to stay near Cottonport or Mansura, we're toughing it out in a hotel on the banks of the Mississippi River just across from Natchez, Mississippi. Sitting just now on the banks of what some call The Big Muddy or Ol' Man River, I feel an odd kinship with Mark Twain and half expect Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to come rafting by. But instead of glimpsing rafts and paddle wheelers, I'm reliving a childhood pleasure watching a whitewashed tugboat chug up the Mississippi. We would often navigate our way to the nearby ship channel when I was a boy in Port Arthur, in order to watch the ships pass. It was cheap entertainment -- just the cost of driving ten miles to get there and back, and gasoline was cheap enough in those days. I loved every minute of those quasi-nautical outings and could sit mesmerized for hours, literally watching the world go by. The vessels I most enjoyed were the tugboats. I've always felt an odd affinity with those worker ants of the channel: Small. Compact. Useful. One might even say Necessary, particularly if you're a barge. These diminutive marine weight lifters are powerful, able to do more than one would expect, or that it even knows about itself. Tugboats have the character of an English bulldog -- Winston Churchill on the mighty Mississipp.  No river royalty for these crafts -- leave that for the paddle wheel steamers. No, tugs are more akin to river roadies. They do the hard work. There's nothing flashy about them, but they go about their aquatic assignments with a great amount of understated style. Tugboats exert immense force seemingly effortlessly. Attention inevitably shifts to the bulky but impotent vessel in front carrying precious cargo, but the crew and any well-initiated onlookers know where the credit belongs. It belongs to the pug nosed boat below and behind. Would I be stretching the analogy to say I hope to be a kind of human tugboat?  What I mean simply is that I want Christ to gain all the credit for anything good in my life, and am content to be a dependable vessel doing the Master's will until my course is finished and I hear him say, "Well done..."

Favorite Quotes on Worship

As we pull the shade on another Lord's day, I offer for meditation two of my favorite quotes on Worship:

"Worship is giving God the best that He has given you. Be careful what you do with the best you have. Whenever you get a blessing from God, give it back to Him as a love-gift. Take time to meditate before God and offer the blessing back to Him in a deliberate act of worship. If you hoard it for yourself, it will turn into spiritual dry rot, as the manna did when it was hoarded (see Exodus 16:20). God will never allow you to keep a spiritual blessing completely for yourself. It must be given back to Him so that He can make it a blessing to others."

(Oswald Chambers )

“Phrases like Worship Service or Service of Worship are tautologies. To worship God means to serve him. Basically there are two ways to do it. One way is to do things for him that he needs to have done - run errands for him, fight on his side, feed his lambs, and so on. The other way is to do things for him that you need to do – sing songs for him, create beautiful things for him, give things up for him, tell him what’s on your mind and in your heart, in general rejoice in him and make a fool of yourself for him the way lovers have always made fools of themselves for the one they love.  A Quaker Meeting, a Pontifical High Mass, the Family Service at First Presbyterian, a Holy Roller Happening – unless there is an element of joy and foolishness in the proceedings, the time would be better spent doing something useful.”

(Frederick Buechner)

Sculpting

This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues & there’s a rumor going around that some of us are someday going to come to life.__C.S. Lewis

God is Beautiful

At this tender stage of another Lenten season, I have a confession to make. I do not attend Roman Catholic mass, but I do make an occasional visit to Catholic churches, usually during the lunch hour, for the purpose of prayer and meditation.  Although I don't exactly stealth my way in with paranoid glances over either shoulder, this incognito custom goes against the religious grain of everything my mother instructed and practiced--stay away from anything Catholic as one would a staph infection.  She didn't come out and say 'They're of the devil," but her eyes betrayed the sentiment. In light of my upbringing, stopping by a Catholic Church to kneel and pray is as out of sync with my past as was the woman that stopped by our Ash Wednesday service in Bosqueville this week and declined to receive the imposition of ashes simply because she was "a Baptist." What draws me to these forbidden zones is not the confessional booth or any other particular Roman Catholic procedure.  I don't consider myself a Protestant--I'm not protesting anything--but I'm not Catholic either, simply a follower of Jesus Christ wanting to be fully his. So, that which beckons to me irrepressibly is the otherworldly artwork, transcendent glass windows containing a kaleidoscope of heavenly hues, candles and incense, statues that both inspire and humiliate, and peace, most of all the peace. For the few moments I allow myself to battle my childhood training and bask in the divine shadow of extravagant artistic expression tuned to whisper Christ's glory, I am transfigured. Utilitarian architecture has its place, I guess, but my soul always longs for more. I think this is what I edge closer to when the peace and filtered light wrap around me like a favorite blanket. And at that moment, maybe for just that moment, I lose sight of everything except that God is beautiful.

What Good are Ashes?

What good are ashes? Peculiar at best is the imposition of mealy black crosses on foreheads in the name of penitence. Taken at face value (pun intended), this may be one of the oddest expressions of Christianity extant, ranking up there with white smoke signaling another pontiff elected. Again I ask, what good are ashes in a world that condones war, winks at poverty, denies slavery, allows ignorance, and fosters fear?  It would seem that we have more important matters with which to occupy our churches.  But Lenten ashes have stood the test of time  because of their powerful visual contrast to our culture's obsession with more, more of everything, more of anything. Ashes remind that brokenness is the prerequisite to anything of spiritual value. I turn to Christ during Lent because I remember what it's like to be me. In brokenness I find healing and in grieving I am qualified to rejoice. Pablo Neruda, that magnificent poet of Chile in the twentieth century, wrote: "Let us uncork all our bottled up happiness." On Ash Wednesday we begin to remember where we put it. Happiness is hiding behind each splintered relationship, crouching just there in distended shadows of the towering twins regret and remorse. As we identify the origins of our pain and contemplate the consequences of our rebellion against the Grace-maker, forgiveness comes in waves. Small consolations followed by expanding relief and, ultimately, a crescendo of restoration. 

The Healing of Memories

Why contradict grace? Why reopen beleaguered wounds and delay the metamorphosis grace promises? What summons us to find sordid pleasure in self-inflicted lesions -- slumbering dragons awakened by self-pity. Enough is enough! The enemy has gained a purchase in too many lives. For every individual who foists pain on herself or himself over and over for a hurt done to them or done by them in the past, let the healing begin:

"More even than our bodies, she said, it was these hurtful memories that needed healing. For God, all time is one, and we were to invite Jesus into our past as into a house that has been locked up for years -- to open windows and doors for us so that life and light could enter at last, to sweep out the debris of decades, to drive back the shadows.  The healing of memories was like the forgiveness of sins, she said."   

(A pulsating truth that Buechner received first-hand from Agnes Sanford many years ago.)

A Survivor's Take on Abortion

Three separate influences this weekend set me to thinking about abortion. First, my gaze was riveted yesterday to a billboard on Franklin Avenue entreating every passerby to fast and pray (beginning Ash Wednesday) for the end to abortion. Next, Jo and I watched an interview with Bill Donahue of the Catholic League concerning the movie Philomena (which I've yet to see), and it's negative view of both adoption and the Catholic Church. Finally, I read this morning a quote by my favorite author, Frederick Buechner, on the subject, in which he  pushes us to be wider in our perspective. While I can appreciate anyone's honest struggle with abortion, I must confess a personal vested interest in every human outcome of the debate. I was born to an unwed mother in 1960 and would have had a damning designation on my birth certificate were it not for the tireless efforts of Edna Gladney on behalf of children like me some twenty years before. As bad as it would have been to have a prejudiced label on my birth certificate, the good news is that I had a birth certificate. The even better news is that my birth mother had the courage to enter the Sellers Baptist Home in New Orleans and gift me to Henry and Lois, a couple with hearts large enough to allow a child to flourish in the arms of great nourishing love.  I would never denigrate that poor young woman's angst over yielding her child, and, in fact, attempt consciously to live in such a way as to validate the outcome of her own soul debate. Two things get lost in the debate over choice versus life: the enduring turmoil of the mother-in-waiting and the enduring destiny of the child-in-waiting. Buechner helps at this point:

"And yet, and yet. Who knows what treasure life may hold for even such children as those, or what treasures even such children as those may grow up to become? To bear a child even under the best of circumstances, or to abort a child even under the worst — the risks are hair-raising either way and the results incalculable."- Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

For those who uphold the individual's choice as superior to the unborn child, you will, no doubt, abhor my opposition to your position.  For those who vilify the individual in support of a moral dilemma, you must excuse my sensitivity to the turmoil of the woman.  The bottom-line is this: I write not on this critical issue as a physician or a scientist or a theologian or a liberal or a conservative; I speak as a survivor. 

Greater Value of Relationship

In Philippians 3:1-11 the apostle Paul gives an autobiographical account that leads to a remarkable declaration. He describes an impressive and impeccable religious pedigree, then marks it all null and void in light of the greater value of knowing Christ. His own study in contrasts leads us down the path to intimacy with Jesus Christ. Essentially, religion is revealed to be inferior to relationship.

Herding Cats in Pajamas

"I saw you outside herding cats in pajamas, so thought I'd stop by for a moment."  My neighbor's statement took me by surprise as did his uncharacteristic early morning stop on his way to teach at the local community college. I never know quite what to expect from my friend; he is, after all, a musician. As he spoke to me from inside his truck, I stood exposed in blue tartan plaid lounging pants, ETBU T-shirt, and Joseph A. Banks slippers (I single them out because I'm quite pleased with myself for having found them at a bargain basement price), while our Calico and Himalayan played figure eights around my ankles. When our brief conversation concluded and my neighbor headed off to his collegiate destination, my attention turned to two obnoxious cats, now circling at a frenetic clip. Having acquiesced to their morning demands, I had pause to reflect on my friend's curious phrase, "herding cats in pajamas," and the thought struck hard -- that's what I've been doing my entire adult life as a "minister." Vocational Christian ministry is much akin to herding cats, a frustrating divine assignment that leaves the minister entirely exposed and frequently embarrassed.  We are exposed because ministry demands transparency or else it is merely play acting.  In turn, transparency makes the minister vulnerable to regular criticism and occasional accolades, both of which are damaging to her/his servant spirit. And the payoff? Watching cats trapse in figure eights around your ankles while feeling helpless to stop the circus. So, what would motivate anyone to stoop to such ridiculous servitude?  What could possibly enamor enough to seduce one to herd cats day after day and year after year?  I can only answer with the phrase the Apostle Paul invoked when contemplating his own herd of cats, "Therefore, since through God's mercy we have this ministry, we do not lose heart" (2 Co 4:1).  Ministry of any kind is grace. Thanks be to God for his indescribable mercy!