The Forest For the Trees and All That Jazz

"He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree." - A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, p. 198

As the story goes, these words were proverbially whispered into Donald Miller's ear by Victor Frankl. And now they're being whispered into mine. I've heard the adage about not losing the forest for the trees over and again, but I'd never found it as liberating as the whispered words of Frankl.

As a pastor, it seems that I am charged with the cultivation of a small section of the forest. This means sometimes paying extra attention to certain trees at certain times. Yet my ultimate call is to serve the forest. My call is to recount the story of the forest to a bunch of trees, and hope that they can see beyond themselves enough to get excited about the forest which they've been planted in all along. My call is to lead our little section of the forest faithfully, that we may bring glory to the One who created and planted the entire forest.

The metaphor falls apart if I try to take it too much further, as the differences between trees and people become too great, but it seems to work well to illustrate community. As far as I know, trees don't have thoughts, but how silly would it be for a single tree to think the entire forest revolved around it? Or that it could survive without all the other trees? Or without water and sun?

May we live for the Kingdom of God, not our kingdom. And when our kingdom comes crashing down around us, may the Kingdom be made evident in the loving words and works of His church. And may we be so caught up in the magnetic pull of the Kingdom that we forget our kingdom ever existed.

The story of the King and His Kingdom is better than the story of little kingdom that tried to compete.

This Blowhard Preacher

I have recently begun re-reading Blue Like Jazz in preparation for taking on Donald Miller's latest book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years (which, as I understand, is grounded in the experience/revelation Mr. Miller had through the process of adapting Jazz into a film).

I am re-reading Jazz because it's been about four years since I read it, and I sense that the experience will enhance my reading of A Million Miles. Donald Miller is hilarious. His stream of consciousness seems to lack an edit button, and we as readers are better for it.

Early in the book, Miller is reflecting on how as an aspiring author, he didn't own a television, and didn't watch much of it. It is undignified and shallow for a writer to debase themselves with the stuff of television. But one day, all that changed...

A couple of years ago, however, I visited a church in the suburbs, and there was this blowhard preacher talking about how television rots your brain. He said that when we are watching television our minds are working no harder than when we are sleeping. I thought that sounded heavenly. I bought one that afternoon. (Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz, p. 15.)

Maybe you have to actually be a preacher to find this as funny as I do. But when I read this line Monday morning, the preschoolers and teachers in the building probably thought there was something wrong with me. Or that I was wasting time watching silly YouTube videos again. I was an embodied LOL.

Bearing the message of the Gospel and the Kingdom is serious stuff, but I don't want to take myself too seriously. Blowhard preachers are funny, but not in a good way. At least not if you're the preacher. Thanks for keeping us honest, Don.

New Year's Resolution | Getting Out of My Head

I never make New Year's resolutions. Usually because I think I'm above that sort of thing. As you know, New Year's resolutions have this reputation of not being helpful. They rarely make it out of January (or so I hear), and the skeptic inside me has wondered: why bother? Well this year, I spontaneously made a resolution. It's practical, measurable and will hopefully preserve my sanity a bit. In 2010, I resolve to spend a half-hour of each of my workdays READING.

This is not reading for sermon or Bible study prep. Just reading. I hope to spend a half-hour a day reading at home as well, but that's not part of the resolution. Thirty minutes a day. Should be doable.

A little background on why this resolution is of particular importance to me in 2010.

It may seem at first counterintuitive, or maybe it will give voice to what you've always suspected or known, but I think that pastors have a tendency to be self-absorbed. We are not all self-absorbed (notice I said "tendency"), but we spend a lot of time with our own thoughts, speaking our interpretations to a (sometimes) captive audience, and we are generally immersed in situations where "faking it" is much easier than seeking the help of others. Many pastors exist in a minefield, and left unchecked, those mines start exploding, leaving the pastor badly injured and their families and churches barraged with shrapnel. But you have probably already heard (or experienced) some of those stories.

Anyway, as I come to the end of my first year in pastoral ministry, I sense a strong need to get outside of my own head each day. I do this by sharing difficult situations with friends, journaling, taking my alloted time off, dancing with my wife and kids, pretending my kitchen is a karaoke bar, composing absurdist limericks, and by reading.

The sermon I preach cannot be the only one I hear each week. I crave the perspective of great thinkers and prophets of ages past and present. I am never tempted to ignore the voices of the musician/poets of the age (as evidenced by my previous two posts), but reading the prophetic words of great novelists, essayists and theologians doesn't come as naturally. It requires more work. It isn't part of my rhythm. It can feel like academic rigor. Plus, I'm pretty good at pretending to be well read.

I need this resolution, and eleven days in, it's going pretty well. I sure hope my resolution makes it past January.

How about you? Any pressing resolutions for you in 2010? Thoughts on the concept of the resolution? Suggestions for good books?

Headed to Washington

Marcie and I will be in Washington (the state, not the district) for the next few days. First to Seattle, then to Centralia. Our dear friends Ryan and Devyn will be wed there on Saturday, and I will be an usher. I take my role very seriously, and have been practicing at local restaurants. Aside from a few awkward glances and that one guy who punched me in the face, people seem to be satisfied with my ushering skillz (yes, that's skillz, not skills). Maybe I can get some more practice in at the airports on the way...

And for those who take listmaking as seriously as I, there was a glaring omission on my top albums list. I mistakenly omitted the wonderful album "Parc Avenue" by a band called Plants & Animals from the list. I would put it at number eight. There, I feel better now.

Lately I've been spending a lot of time with Addison, enjoying reading Walter Brueggemann's classic "The Prophetic Imagination," and working toward preparing a sermon on 1 Corinthians 3. The peace of Christ be with you all.

Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear

I got a chance to briefly meet and hear papers from some wonderful scholars at the Symposium on the Theological Interpretation of Scripture held at North Park Theological Seminary early this fall. The theme of the symposium was "The Idolatry of Security." Different presenters took the topic in different directions, some focusing on national security, others on personal security, and still others on eschatological security. I found Scott Bader-Saye from the University of Scranton to be particularly engaging. Ironically, Bader-Saye presented on a Thursday night, causing me to miss my weekly viewing of a new episode of The Office (which takes place in Scranton, PA).

Well, now that I'm done with seminary, I have finally been able to dig into Bader-Saye's 2007 book from the Christian Practice of Everyday Life series, Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear. Bader-Saye does a remarkable job of maintaining balance in his treatment of a very touchy subject. He manages to look at fear from many angles without losing focus on the primary goal, which is to help his readers "...live into the joyful freedom of those children of God who have learned to put fear in its place."

Bader-Saye argues that fear is the shadow side of love; all fear is somewhere rooted in a love for something or someone. So in a sense, in order to squelch all fear, we would have to squelch all love. Most of us can agree that this is a bad idea. Following the wisdom of Aquinas, Bader-Saye urges us not to become fearless, but to make sure our fears are rightly ordered. We must question whether our fears are imminent, powerful, threating, and legitimate. We need to question whether we're overrreacting to the objects of our fear. Are we lashing out, closing up, and losing the joy of life? Are we opening ourselves up to manipulation?

Our fears can be properly ordered when understood within the right narrative, and when they don't paralyze us from doing good. Bader-Saye suggests three virtuous practices to help us properly order our fears: hospitality, peacemaking and generosity. All three of these ask us to risk, and all three of these can be potential threats to our security, but all three of these help us to truly preserve the love which our fearful instincts fight so hard to protect.

I've laid out some of the nuts and bolts, but it must be noted that Bader-Saye writes in a very engaging way, using plenty of examples from pop culture and stories from real life to narrate his points. He quotes lyrics from U2, Dashboard Confessional, Bruce Springsteen and Tim McGraw, analyzes films like the Star Wars saga and Pieces of April, and engages the literature of Elie Wiesel and C. S. Lewis. And of course he deals throughout with the political landscape and its relentless use of fear as a motivational tool to mobilize Americans on the right and left.

Bader-Saye deals with the doctrine of Providence, a doctrine largely (and sadly) forgotten outside of the Reformed tradition and sadly distorted in the great injustices of Manifest Destiny, etc. Yet the author insists that the providence of God is precisely what we must trust if we are to put fear in its place. He writes, "Providence is the conviction that through it all God's story cannot be lost, and thus God's hopes for the human story cannot be thwarted."

I think he's on to something. So buy it, read it, and have your friends read it so you can discuss it and together change the world.

200mcs: One Down, Two To Go

I haven't retired from blogging, I swear.

I finished my first 200 mile commuting semester (henceforth 200mcs) just under a week ago, and I really enjoyed it. The 200 mile commute thing kind of sucks, but in a weird way, it's been really good. A lot of good thoughts swirled in my head this semester, and a lot of my classes interacted in profound ways so that it was an especially meaningful semester.

I wrote papers on the image of God, the incarnation, resurrection and return of Christ, eschatology, eco-theology, sacraments, the Trinity, gospel communication to indie-hipsters, hospitality and the christological basis for ecological preservation and designed a worship service for the first Sunday of Advent. I read some great books (The Way of Jesus Christ by Jurgen Moltmann, Free of Charge by Miroslav Volf, a book on sacraments by Leonard Vander Zee), a lot of good ones (Jesus the Liberator by Jon Sobrino, a couple books by Robert Webber, Whose Religion is Christianity? by Lamin Sanneh, Eyes Wide Open by William Romanowski, Border Crossings by Rodney Clapp, Mosaic of Christian Beliefs by Roger Olson, Selling Out the Church by Kenneson and Street, White Woman's Christ and Black Woman's Jesus by Jacqueline Grant, Luther, Feminism and the Cross by Thompson along with a collection of African christologies), and the occasional forgettable book (...).

I had some great conversations with old friends and made some new ones. I learned a lot about theology, christology, worship, communication and hospitality, and learned the art of sleeping on a six foot couch. I walked the line between guest and mooch, and when I came home I was able to truly be with my family. I got to see Yo La Tengo, Rosie Thomas and Over the Rhine all thanks to my wife's place of employment, Calvin College. Addison got bigger and smarter and more beatiful every day, and I have come to appreciate Marcie more than ever. It's sufficient to say that I don't deserve her and that's a fact.

I didn't blog much because I kept painting myself into a corner, promising to post about something specific, but never feeling inspired to fulfill those promises. From henceforth no more promises will be made on this blog.

You have my word.

And you have my love.

Living Jesus

So as the semester is approaching on Monday, I have decided to get a bit of a headstart on reading. I know once classes start, it's gonna be a whirlwind, so I'm at least introducing myself to some of my books.

I've started working on a couple books for my Christology class. I was excited for the class to begin with, but after beginning the readings, I'm even more excited. The first book we have been assigned is Living Jesus by Luke Timothy Johnson, and it is right up my alley. The basis premise is that in our quest to learn Jesus, we have, for the last 100 years anyway, begun with the wrong question. Before we get into historical method and source/redaction/form criticism, we need to ask a far more basic question; "Is Jesus alive or dead?"

Johnson argues that if Jesus is alive, as so many of us confess, then we ought not treat him as a historical (dead) figure when trying to learn about him. Rather, we take what we know of who Jesus is through the eyewitness accounts of his disciples and friends, continued over the past 2000 years through the work of the Holy Spirit in his church, also combined with our own experience of Christ in the context of the church, and now we're closer to being able to learn Jesus.

The whole historical Jesus quest always struck me as odd, and Johnson has put some solid feet on that which was only an inkling in my relatively uneducated mind. I'm also beginning to read Jurgen Moltmann's The Way of Jesus Christ, and in his prologue, he explains that he named the book what he did just because Jesus is so dynamic, and cannot be nailed down as "known" in some static sort of way. Jesus is always known in a dynamic relationship, not as a static, distant historical figure. So I'm getting the same sort of approach from two different angles, and I feel theologically energized by it.

Dear God, what have I become? I just used the term "theologically energized." Oh yeah, I became a seminary student again. My fellow nerds and I will retire to the nerdery with our Greek lexicons.

Kurt Vonnegut

One of the great social critics of our age, Kurt Vonnegut, has passed away. The public libraries of Indianapolis have been focusing on Vonnegut this year, so his name has been at the front of my mind a lot lately. I read Cat's Cradle in high school, and excessive repetition of a recurring line from Slaughterhouse-Five was an inside joke between myself, my roommate and Matthew iPod Morrison during college, and would be appropriate for such a time as this...so it goes. He was a jester in the best sense of the word. Thanks for some wonderfully entertaining and thought provoking literature.

Quick Update

A dear friend visited us this weekend. It was great to catch up, philosophize, theologize, randomize, etc. Next time, maybe we'll get to see both Bookers.

I preached again this Sunday. I'll post my sermon manuscript/outline again if there are requests, but it takes up too much space if nobody's going to read it. I'm almost finished with They Like Jesus, But Not the Church, and would recommend it to anyone like me, with a heart for people, yet feeling bottled in a Christians-only world against your will.

Marcie had the flu (or food poisoning?) yesterday and is recovering today. Thankfully, it seems that Addison and I have avoided the bug. It pains me to see Marcie in agony. What an amazing family I have been given. I am truly undeserving.

The new Arcade Fire album is great. I am really glad I chose it (out of the many discs I had in my hand at one point or another during my audio purchase quest).