Outside Your Window

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Outside Your Window

 

Today started a new series entitled ‘Multiply’ as we continue in our study of Matthew.  The text for today is Matthew 9:35 through 10:42; the meat o these verses being Jesus commissioning his twelve disciples to expand his ministry by serving people following the example he’s given them.

To start today’s message in context, we took a detailed look at Matthew 9:35-38. The word ‘compassion’ being used here is more than just feeling sorry for another. When we look at the original language, this word is describing an emotional and physical reaction Jesus has to seeing the lost state of the people around him as they grope for something to complete their spiritual selves. This is a gut-wrenching sorrow for humanity.

Second is the word ‘harvest’. As an amateur vegetable gardener, I understand too well the urgency or harvesting your crop before (1) another mammal does or (2) it over-ripens and is ruined. The harvest is ripe, the harvest is urgent.

Our main emphasis as  a church was a prayer that I have prayed many times; Abba, let me see people through your eyes. Brandon Heath recorded a song in 2009 that accurately captures this desire, “Give Me Your Eyes”.

Jesus approached the unapproachable, touched the untouchable, and embraced every sector of society without hesitation or remorse. He broke down walls with complete disregard for his own safety. Now he’s turning to his inner circle and telling them, “It’s your turn.” As followers of Jesus, we are included in that call. Go and make disciples of the people right outside our windows. Jesus does not warn the disciples away from adversity, he tells them to expect it and embrace it. “Do not fear those who can kill your body but cannot kill your soul. Rather, fear him who can destroy both body and soul in hell. (Matthew 10:28).

The theme of today’s message and resulting drawing brought back an image created for our ‘Bold’ series last year. A figure, representing you as an individual and the church as a whole, being faced with a decision; step out in faith or play it safe? In both images, the figure has taken down the warning labels members of society (many who are inside church walls) set in place to keep themselves safe and is stepping out into the perceived danger in faith. It is important to note the figure walks alone. Stepping out in faith is not a movement, it’s a decision we make as individuals that risks no one following.

Who do you see outside your own window who needs someone reach out to them? Take a bold step, introduce yourself then introduce them to Jesus.

A Prayer for Boldness

Prayer for Boldness

 

Unpack

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Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothes?   Matthew 6:25

3-10-13, City on a Hill 7, Unpack

 

I will do what God wants me to do.

I will give God what I cannot do.

I will trust him no matter what.

Like a well used suitcase, covered with pictures and scars from a lifetime of travel, everyone has a story that longs to be told. Each trip added a little for weight to the luggage, each destination another mark on the case. The material and dimensions of a piece of luggage determines how much that item will hold before breaking. Airlines limit the weight of each bag of luggage because they know the limits of their aircraft, too heavy and the plane will plummet. The human spirit is weight-rated as well, we are not designed to carry all the baggage life piles upon us alone. God gives us each other to share the load. This weekend magnified the importance of telling our story, regardless of how insignificant it may seem to the storyteller.

Unpack your bags, tell your story, because we’re living together on the other side of done.

 

Shhhh…..

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2-24-13, City on a Hill 5, Shhh

Matthew 6:1-4

At first glance, it seems today’s theme is contradicting the last post. Bear with me and we’ll hash out what’s going on. In the fourth drawing from the City on a Hill series, we discussed the allegories of salt and light Jesus highlighted in chapter 5. The quick summary of his point there is to live out your faith, actively serving and giving to anyone in need. Jesus explicitly states, “let your light shine before others, so that they may see you good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16) Just a few paragraphs later, we find this, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for the you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:1) So which is it, Jesus? Do good works in front of people or not? Reading prescriptively would inspire just such a question. To understand what Jesus is really teaching, we must change our perspective to an outsider viewing the crowd he is addressing instead of inserting ourselves as  being the sole representative of the crowd.

In Matthew 5, Jesus is speaking to the working-class citizens who are listening. He is addressing the poor, entreating them to love and serve each other by giving of their time and money. He encourages them to do so visibly as a motivator for their fellow citizens to follow suit. In the first verses of chapter 6, the focus of his words are aimed at the rich and religious elite who, up to this point, have undoubtedly been cheering Jesus on! He says to them, don’t let pride be your motivator for serving. Everyone knows you have money and power, don’t flaunt it using philanthropy. Pride is not honorable in God’s eyes.

This made me consider the whole Occupy Wall Street movement, and all the sub-movements that stemmed from the media hype. The motivations, methods, and attitudes of both Wall Street and the Occupiers rank high on my cynical radar. I imagine Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount from a bench in Central Park, Occupy members mixed with some of the homeless community would be crowding up, front and center. Wall Street, NYPD on horseback, and many political leaders would line the outer skirts of the audience to enforce crowd control, but also within earshot of the profound words being spoken. With what little first-hand knowledge I have of either group, my media-driven understanding of the occupiers is freeing America’s poor from the corrupt, oppressive thumb of America’s elite. The elite are just out to make a buck, and the media only portrays the dark side of corrupt business, presenting it as the gold standard of all business. I filter all forms of media through a healthy screen of skepticism, no matter which side they seem to support, so I am convinced neither of the descriptions above are accurate. If they were, however, Wall Street would be like the Pharisee, guilty of flaunting their philanthropy to generate more prestige and likely convert that into new business opportunities. The occupiers would be just as guilty of ignoring the needs of those around them and spending too much time calling for Wall Street to be more public with their giving!

To sum all this up in today’s drawing, I have used the bottom half of the Guy Fawkes mask (at least a quick version of it) to represent the an abbreviated message of the Occupy movement; give. Extending from the bottom of the page is a hand with a single raised finger. The finger covers the lips of Guy Fawkes, positioned so that you hear a quiet whisper of “shhh” in the back of your mind.

The message I will apply yo myself from today is this; occupy yourself, selflessly giving to anyone in need, but do it quietly so that pride does not become your motivator.

 

The Road Less Travelled

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2-10-13, City on a Hill 4, The Road Less Travelled

 

We’ve reached a dangerous point in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is about to bring up subjects like murder, adultery, making promises, revenge, and loving your enemies….prepare your toes for a good stomping.

Matthew 5:21-48 (paraphrased using my words)

Jesus starts off agreeably enough with his thoughts on murder. He says it something like this, “You know the old law, do not murder because whomever commits murder will face judgement”; I can hear an “Amen” echoing in unison. But…..”I say, if you’re so much as angry with your brother, you’re just as guilty.” (and the crowd goes silent)

As if that wasn’t enough to silence even the most honorable person, Jesus continues……

“Don’t bother leaving God any offerings when you are angry, settle your drama first.”

“You’ve been told to remain faithful to your spouse and not to commit adultery. In God’s eyes, if you even look on another with lustful fantasies, you’re guilty. (this is where the men start to turn and leave) What can you do about it, you ask? If your eye causes you to sin, leading you to salivate over another person, real or virtual (1.e. porn), take a sharp object and gouge it out! If your hands cause you to sin…….let your imagination run wild there………cut it off! It’d be better to lose an appendage than to lose your soul!”

Now many are thinking, “Dude, lighten up!” HA! Jesus continues…..

“You’ve heard about divorce. Just issue the proper paperwork, sign the dotted line and you’re in the clear.  (Shaking his head) Anyone who divorces for any reason other than sexual unfaithfulness makes her an adulterer, and anyone who re-marries after a divorce is committing adultery!”

“You’ve been taught not to swear falsely. I say don’t swear at all! Just keep your word and no oaths are needed!”

“You live by the principle ‘an eye for an eye’, this is wrong. If someone steals from you, give them more. If someone slanders you, don’t get defensive. Let you silence inspire you to an even higher level of integrity so the offending party proves themselves the fool.”

“You’ve heard to love your friends and hate your enemies?! Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors. Even the bottom-feeders in your culture know how to love their friends.”

Jesus caps off this portion of the sermon with a little tongue-in-cheek statement directed toward the most self-righteous in the audience and, as I imagine, spoken with a slight chuckle, “Do you want to please God? Be perfect, just like he is perfect.”

I expect the sheer volume of the tension in the air drowned out any lingering noise still resonating from the crowd.

It would be a mistake to read these words and return to your routing thinking God expects nothing less than absolute perfection from you. Does he demand it? Yes. But He knows you better than that. Perfection is not the finish line of this race we’re running, it is the bar we can never reach on our own. The sermon on the mount was spoken to highlight our inadequacy and draw out that tension from trying to be “god enough” for God.

I pulled inspiration from several sources for today’s drawing. First, I’ve been on a fantasy kick from reading the Chronicles of Narnia with my boys and The Lord of the Rings on my own, today’s setting is like a crossroads where Frodo may choose to enter the dark forest or take a rocky, mountainous path. Mt second influence is Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken. A more obvious inspiration, I depict the yellow wood (in black and white) with a path that divides in two, one route obviously more traversed than the other. The path to the left leads into a circle, marked with a sign “Purgatory Mountain”. Some friends of mine recently hiked a mountain named Purgatory and took photos of a sign at the summit of their hike which notified hikers they had reached then end of the trail and to return the same way they came. I jokingly asked them if moving forward would lead in to a perpetual “figure 8″ trail from which hikers cannot escape? That is the trail I am showing on the right, a perpetual cycle of try hard – do good – fail in an attempt to please God. One path leads out of this cycle, but leads to the impassable jagged rocks. Taking this route means admitting your inadequacy and submitting a cry for help. As the light reaches through the cracks of the rocks, help will come.

I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

 

 

Zombie Faith

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2-2-13, City on a Hill 3, Zombie Faith

 

Our third week of the City on a Hill series continues dissecting the Sermon on the Mount, tackling some increasingly touchy subjects as we keep digging deeper. Our main topic of discussion today was ‘Fulfillment of the Law’ with all the connotations and insinuations it entails. Matthew 5:17-20, I have not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.

In this segment of his message, Jesus is speaking directly to the outwardly religious in the crowd. This is the leading issue that caused such violent back-lash by the religious elite in Jerusalem. Jesus is publicly calling them out for their hypocrisy. Our chosen manner of reception as we read the Bible brings us to a crossroads where we can choose the path of the righteous elite or the path of Jesus. Dean laid this out to us in a way I had not heard before, contrasting prescriptive reading with descriptive reading. A prescription provides a black and white solution to a problem; to get ‘A’ one must do ‘B’. Reading the Bible as a prescription for salvation interprets Jesus’s words as a set of minimum guidelines every individual must stay within. As a result of living life between these lines, you are in right standing with God on your day of judgement. Prescriptive reading leads to a self-righteous world-view. Donald Miller communicated a most excellent description of self-righteousness in a Storyline blog post last week; “When people are self-righteous, they are not getting their sense of righteousness from themselves. They’re getting it from you.” Self-righteous, prescriptively religious people evaluate their self-worth by comparing themselves to everyone else. “At least I’m not living like Bob over there, God must really be happy with me.” or “I’m not as good as Chuck, I need to spend more time at church.” Neither attitudes are spiritually productive, much less attractive to those still searching for their faith.

Descriptive reading converts the external interpretation of Jesus’s teaching as a checklist into an introspective evaluation to better oneself into becoming the person Jesus describes. The clearer the image Jesus paints for us becomes, the more we realize it is a life no human can ever attain. The righteousness God requires is an ultimate impossibility for the created human, at least unobtainable on our own.

Righteousness is not a status determined by what we do, we must also take into account our motives for doing. Your attempts at being kind to strangers is good, but is not righteous without a genuine concern for the person that outweighs your ego-boost from being kind. As we’ll read in the coming weeks; hate (on any level and toward any person), jealousy (again, of anyone or anything), lust (that buzz you get around that guy or girl this culture mis-defines as ‘love’. Put a ring on it or get away), entertaining any of these attitudes is a blemish on our righteousness. God is perfect, requiring everything in his presence to be also perfect. The smallest blemish puts you on the black-list…….unless. Jesus. Jesus is our mediator, standing in our place before God. He accepts all of our bruises and blemishes so that we are accepted into God’s kingdom as sons and daughters. Jesus is the wall of righteous we pass through, coming out clean on the other side.

My inspiration for today’s drawing is actually a painting concept I tossed around more than a year ago. Self-righteous people, like the Pharisee leaders Jesus’s word convicted, look normal (at the least) on the outside, but are rotting at their core. They work to hide their sin by preaching (hollering) against the very things they do behind closed doors. Tying that person in with the Tinkerbell salvation experience from last week’s post and the resulting image is of a spiritual zombie. Where a “real” zombie walks the earth with an insatiable appetite for brains, spiritual zombies hunger for minds, yours and mine. The more minds they can add to their conversion record, the more righteous they become. Their goal is strictly numbers, once they take a bite of your mind, you are counted as their spiritual property and the responsibility to live up to their standards is yours to fail.

Spiritual zombies are ingrained with a dogma that they must prove their own righteousness by disproving yours. They are quick to point out faults, boisterously preach the “right” ways to live and worship, then quickly disappear when their true state of equal broken-ness appears. The first appendage to decay on these zombies are their ears. They recoil and strike at the first hint of questioning or disagreement, refusing to hear any argument that does not echo their own position. Real zombies act on hunger instinct alone, travelling in herds to the next source of brains. Spiritual zombies lack the ability to think for themselves as long as their zombie-ism persists. As time progresses, lack of communication and stunted growth leads to cannibalism. When no “unrighteous” people are within striking distance, the self-righteous minds must turn to consuming each other, competing for the title of most-righteous.

But there is hope. Jesus, through his life and sacrifice, changed the barrier of the law from a wall in which we face-plant into a membrane we can freely permeate and come through cured. Recognizing the righteous person Jesus describes as our baseline model is himself, a level we can never obtain without his covering, righteousness becomes an lifestyle to live because of, not one to live for. When we live because of the righteous status Jesus has already raised us to, our hands are ready to serve, our eyes look for opportunities, and our ears are open to listen.

A figure has collapsed on the right of the drawing, as zombie that has been cured by Jesus’s righteous membrane. He lays out his hands, submitting to his inadequacy and the guidance of the gospel; his ears having grown back into operable place.

 

He who has an ear, let ‘em hear. – best recited by Bob Clyde during a Revelation study in the BSU at ECU

 

Extinguished

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1-27-13, City on a Hill 2, ExtingsuishedToday we reach the salt and light verses, familiar in most religious circles but applied in all too few.

Matthew 5:13-15

You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled by men. (just like the sewage)

You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand and it gives light to everyone in the house.

These words were spoken by Jesus to people who followed him, some by action others only by words. Obviously, Jesus is using the analogy of ‘salt’ and ‘light’ and their environmental impact to describe a real Christ follower and their cultural impact. Due to the explicit description of living a “Christian” life, these same words are recited at many baptisms (mine included), but in these modern times, are they anything more than just words?

Salt enhances flavor and preserves meats. It can also be used as a landscaping tool, destroying plants’ (or weeds’) ability to grow in dirt where it is mixed. Even the slightest pinch of the mineral cannot pass our taste buds unnoticed. The presence of salt is felt, seen, tasted, and smelt; not because it forces you to see but because it simply cannot be disguised. If you claim to follow Jesus, does your spiritual presence command such attention?

Light infiltrates every possible crevasse without putting forth any additional effort. Carry a burning candle into a dark room, no surface in the room can escape its touch. Any light source, regardless of intensity, is supremely dominant in darkness. Interesting thing is, the same principle does not work in reverse. Bring light into a dark room and the darkness flees, dark cannot overtake any space without first removing the source of the light.

Modern Christianity has experienced a spiritual devolution which is cutting off any cultural impact or even social relevance “being a Christian” once had at the knees. The statistics for divorce, debt slavery, and physical dependencies are hardly “set apart” by spiritual affiliations. Modern Christians are just as likely to succumb to any of these vices as the modern heathen. Yet these are all situations the Christian faith explicitly addresses and leads its followers to avoid. Has time stripped Christ of His power, resulting in His followers having no better leadership to live a better life? Absolutely not. Jesus has not changed, His followers have.

Around 500 years ago (by what I’ve been able to find), the “rules for becoming a Christian” changed from Jesus’ command to “Follow Me.” (which we discussed in the previous series) to a scripted prayer one must say, insipidusly dubbed “the sinner’s prayer”. The concept of having to pray as a precursor to embracing salvation cannot be located in any biblical text and, borrowing the words of C. S. Lewis, is “a great cataract of nonsense”. Christianity is a faith that results in a relationship and leads to action. As Paul described it, faith without action is dead. Mark Gungor, a lead pastor in Green Bay, WI and marriage guru, describes this largely American phenomenon better than I ever could.  He compares the “sinner’s prayer” to spiritual pixie dust. Just say these few magic words and the salvation fairy will sprinkle forgiveness dust on your head, then you’re in the club. A very comical, but unfortunately accurate depiction of what many claim as their “Christian faith”. This method of promoting “easy salvation”, which one can only assume was a numbers game, has survived long enough now that its shallow nature has trickled up to our church leaders. What if new Christ followers today aren’t searching any deeper than a few magic words because the very people set in place to lead them deeper have never gone deeper themselves? It’s up to the salt and light to lead.

Toady’s drawing is a literal depiction of the lamp, the bowl, and the salt Jesus speaks of. A shadowy winged creature retreats away from the smoldering lamp wick, having extinguished its flame in a trail of pixie dust.