Just Trying To Stay Faithful

April 5, 2007  Easter is here!   A couple of weeks ago I shared the story of picking up a raving Meth addict at the corner of Peachtree Rd and Peachtree Industrial, just up from the new building.  She had been trying unsuccessfully to wave down a ride to get her a few exits down to her part of town.  She was frantic in a combination of frustration, anger, and being strung out.  In the sermon I used her as an example of Jesus’ principle of the importance of the “one” in Matthew 18:3-14.   As I’ve meditated on this bizarre occurrence there have been a lot more things that the Lord has been teaching me.  The most significant for Easter is my identification with this woman.   It is very easy to get an “us vs. them” attitude with people like this.  They are truly horrifying to see and to smell.  This woman, like most meth addicts, has blood red, open sores all over her face, arms, and hands.  Her teeth are rotting out of her skull.  She was so filthy that I had to take very shallow breaths to keep from breathng too deeply.  

She was somewhat coherent, or at least coherent enough to get a ride closer to “home.”  However, she spent most of the time in the car venting, freaking out, shaking, apologizing, crying, telling me how to drive, blessing me, and cursing everyone else.  She never stopped talking, even as she reclined the seat back to “rest.”  The car had barely stopped before she launched herself out of the car and shuffled-stumbled-ran away.    I sat there a bit dazed wondering what in heaven’s name this was all about.  I have two distinct impressions about the encounter.  My first series of thoughts occurred while we were driving.  I had one of those experiences where a multitude of Bible passages shuffles like a deck of cards through my imagination.  I saw all the references to the poor, the afflicted, the demon possessed, and the prisoners.  My mind caught on Jesus’ final public sermon in Matthew 24-25, specifically his sermon on the judgment in 25:31-46.  It’s the one about the sheep and the goats where the sheep take care of the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the prisoner but the goats do not.  Jesus tells them that as they did (or did not) to the least of these they did (or did not) to him, to Jesus.  So I’m thinking, Jesus is with me right now on Saturday afternoon needing a ride.  It freaked me out because I didn’t start my day thinking, “I’m going to be Jesus’ chauffer today.”  It blessed me, but it also disturbed me.  It’s one thing to imagine the noble poor, the deserving prisoner, or the oppressed-but-righteous sufferer.  It’s another thing to see Jesus with a smelly zombie.   My second distinct reality check from this encounter was to see myself.  While I have never been a methamphetamine addict, I have been eaten alive by the venereal disease of sin.  I have had open, weeping sores infecting my soul while I screamed at a world that just seemed to be driving by oblivious to my plight and my pain.  In fact, the only real difference between me and this woman is that she was polite in her sin.  I was a rebellious, defiant, smoldering ingrate.  The scriptures tell us that we all were to some extent.   This Easter I see Jesus from a very distinct vantage point.  I see his mocking, his beatings, and his torments not for “Noble Tim”, but for “Meth Tim”.  I see my very deserved judgment taken up willingly and lovingly by the Son at the Father’s command.  He took all that was due for my sin and paid it in full.  I see that where this addict left my car still an addict, that when Jesus opened the door and brought me in that I was healed.  He embraced me stink and all, and when he took his arms from around me I was clean, dressed in white.    From what vantage point are you looking at Easter?   Whatever it is I pray that it is a heart-deep reminder of the extent of your sin and the greatness of his love.  I pray that you will be renewed and remade again in the grace of the God that claims all of us sin-zombies as his own, and gives us a pure, holy, eternal life as his beloved child.   All glory, thanksgiving, and praise to him alone. 

Old Post from January 25, 2007

I spent most of yesterday doing a first draft of an assignment for my recent seminary class on explaining the Christian faith and dealing with questions and concerns people have about it.  I approached different people to see if they would help me with the project.  Some I knew, some I didn’t.  The questions were amazing and challenging.  There were deceptively simple questions like “Why do some people where jewelry with Christ still on the Cross?” To questions that go to the heart of Christianities compromises and failures around things like the Inquisition, Witch trials, Crusades, etc.  To why some expressions of the faith take all the Mystery out of God and put him in a box.  To why Christianity makes claims that exclude other religions.  I kept thinking how truly important these questions are not because we have to “defend against them,” but because they force us to think deeper.  In many cases the questions serve to take the blinders off our minds and face the Lord and our lives with honesty.   I was responding to one of the people helping me, and I found this amazing confession bubbling up in me.  I had sort of grasped aspects of it, but not the true implications of it until yesterday.  The question dealt with oppression and violence and compromise by the church.  What I realized was that while I had answers, I found myself “undressed.”  I couldn’t get past my own contributions, my own complicity, in the failures of the church in this generation.  I found myself sharing about my time in

Jacksonville two weeks ago with 2nd Mile ministries who live in and among one of the toughest, most violent, and neglected areas of the city.  They have all had their houses broken into and they are surrounded by drugs, violence, etc.  I wrote, “What shocked me most about the visit was my own extreme, internal revulsion to where they were and what they were doing (a revulsion that conflicted with my amazement and admiration).  What I saw struck fear deep into my suburban, racist soul.  I tried hiding behind the fact of all the changes we have made as a church:  how we are doing things in the public school, the after-school program and our helping out in the sliver of the Hispanic, Cambodian, Vietnamese “ghetto” we have adopted.  But I couldn’t balance the scales.  I don’t think the Lord wants me only marginally racist and self-justifying in that I’m doing certain things that excuse me from doing other things that scare me or I find unacceptable.  After looking for excuses and explanations I found that all I could do was cry and ask for the Lord’s forgiveness and help to change and mature.  I couldn’t deny what was there.  I couldn’t pretend to not be afraid or repulsed.  I could only recognize it as sin, and ask for help.”   Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a Klu Klux Klan robe in my closet or anything.  I’m not a screaming, segregationist type of racist.  The racism I’m talking about is a lot more subtle and harder to identify.  In fact, without things like Jacksonville happening I can think really highly of myself, my life, my friends, my experiences.  No, what I’m talking about is something deep and ugly.  That part of our natures that separate and judge out of fear and ignorance.  It may not be the most heinous expression of racism, but it is racism.  Calling it something a little more forgiving isn’t really that helpful or honest.   

Why am I sharing this?  Three reasons:  first to try to get across that our reaching out to people not in the church is so vital to our health as Christians.  Without honest questions and real dialogue, we fall into self-justifying beliefs, arrogance, and, potentially, an Us/Them attitude that is really exclusion and an excuse to not be “salt and light.”  Don’t fear the questions, beloved-of-God.  Listen to them.  Take them to the Lord.  Ask the elders and more experienced among us about them.  Let them search you.  The Lord can use them to bring humility, maturity, and grace.   

My second reason is to let you know that these kinds of situations are proof that we are on the right track.  Some of what we are doing may seem scary.  It reveals the boundaries of our faith and our belief in God’s goodness and faithfulness.  I want you to know that it’s proof that we are on the right path.  We are not in our strength, looking good, and feeling good about ourselves.  Instead we are in a place of needing His strength.  We can only respond in confession and repentance instead of protection.  Psalm 51.17 says, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”  2 Corinthians 12:8 says, “Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.  That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” 

Thirdly, we need to be a transparent community with one another.  I am not immune.  As your pastor it is my privilege to often times lead the way in brokenness and these kinds of revelations.  If you find yourself like me, in a place where you see the ugliness of your soul and wish it were different, then you know that the loving hand of the Lord is upon you.  He is making you like Jesus, fit to walk in his footsteps.  As a community it is important that we be able to share these kinds of things.  They are not shameful.  They are true.  As we share what is true we honor Him who brought us to this truth and we become stronger (and more humble) as a community.  If we don’t share them, we need to be concerned about whether we are living a lie or not.  At the very least we might be stifling a movement of God to bring holiness and righteousness in a new way.    Our goal in all of this, to quote a Shane and Shane song that is running through my head, is ‘May the few and the many see you [the LORD] as you are.”  I would say, “May the few and the many see you as you are through our humility and commitment to truth and confession and not posturing and justifications.”  (Now you know why I’m not a song writer)   I would also appreciate your prayers for what the LORD is doing in me.  I am excited about being transformed, even thought I’m not sure how he is going to do it.  Let me also quickly add, that what I confess is in no way crippling shame.  I am accepted by the Lord based on Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and God’s choosing alone (never on my merit).  What the LORD is doing is loving me and maturing me.  I am not wallowing in loathing or self-pity.  But neither am I pretending that my responses and experience were other than what they were.  

Let me end with a quote from my good friend, Jim Siwy, which seems appropriate to this missive.  It is from Christian Mystics by Ursula King speaking about Teresa of Avila, who is known for her writing about profound visions and inner experiences:

“Although Teresa was given extraordinary mystical favors, she did not consider these essential for spiritual growth: The highest perfection obviously does not consist in interior delights or in great raptures or in visions or in the spirit of prophecy but in having our will so much in conformity with God’s will that there is nothing we know He wills that we do not want with all our desire, and in accepting the bitter as happily as we do the delightful when we know that His Majesty desires it.”