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My heart beats for love. I want to be different. I want to be who I am called to be. WORTHY and LOVED!

Monday, June 25, 2007

Beauty and the Beast

If Little Mermaid is my favorite Disney movie, my favorite character (heroine) is by far Belle from Beauty and the Beast, who is best described as "for all intents and purposes, an Anti-Disney Feminist".

But that being placed aside, here is Belle at the beginning of the movie going off to rescue her father and exchanging her captivity for his. I've found myself returning to this scene several times over the past couple of days. Would I ever really give away my freedom for someone else's? Would I give up all I have for just anyone on the street? Like going to prison in place of a criminal? Would I do that?

Belle made this huge sacrifice which she didn't think about. She just did it. It was knee-jerk in her nature. How often to we make decisions because they are part of us? Do we ever doubt our sacrifices, like Belle did, when we think about them? This is why we need to have the character of Christ and not ask 'What Would Jesus Do?'. Character isn't always rational but questions demands thought out, logical responses. Sometimes we are called to do the illogical and not turn back.

One of the theme songs to the movie is "Be Our Guest". I really like the line “Life is so unnerving for a servant who’s not serving” Are we un-nerved when as Christians we are not turely and totally serving others? Shouldn't we be? And along with that what does it mean to serve someone? Isn't that the ultimate question about what it means to follow Jesus?

Finally (really there was more but I don't know what my notes mean right now) there was a piece of conversation right when the Beast released Belle from the castle:
“I had to let her Go” - Beast
“Why?” - Cogsworth
“I loved her” - Beast
How much is this like God letting us go by giving us free will and crying for us to come back to him? I think it breaks God's heart when we turn away from us, but he had to allow us to be free so our love wasn't bought. Can you imagine the sacrifice?

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Wisdom

Sometimes words of wisdom come from the most unlikely places. This was printed on a toilet stall wall in a restroom in New York I was at
"You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can't bring peace with bombs."

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Bonhoffer

"How can one person pray the prayer of the fellowship without being steadied and upheld in prayer by the fellowship itself?"

"The table fellowship of Christians implies obligation. It is our daily bread that we eat, not my own. We share our bread. Thus we are firmly bound to one another not only in the Spirit but in our whole physical being. The one bread that is given to our fellowship links us together in a firm covenant. Note none dares go hungry as long as another has bread, and he who breaks this fellowship of the physical life also breaks the fellowship of the Spirit"

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

The Little Mermaid

For Christmas my freshman year of college, my good friend and bio lab partner, Dio, got me a book entitled The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust. Oh Dio knows me too well. It combines three of my favorite things - The Bible, Theology, and Disney movies. I read through the book right after I got it, but last night as I was watching the Little Mermaid (in my opinion one of Disney's greatest triumphs - attested to by the fact I had the entire movie memorized at age four) I had this urge to pull out the book again.
Mark I. Pinsky made some outstanding points about the movie. He played with the concept of the basic plot of the movie being about inter-marriage (notice though that the movie is more about conversion then acceptance) but the sub-themes were just as meaningful. When Ariel makes the comment (right before she launches into 'Part of Your World') that she doesn't understand how a world that makes such wonderful things can be bad. When did we begin to confuse quality of worth with materialism? Is our world good because we have things or is it good because God said it was good the whole way back in Genesis? For the last couple of days I have had the opportunity to really notice some things around my house. Especially my curio cabinets. They are chalk full of things - and as nice as they are I don't think they are necessary. How often do we buy out of impulse to reflect our status instead of giving things away or using our money in a better way? Things in and of themselves are not bad, but they are supposed to remind us of God creating us to be people who create. And materialism should never block us from God or our neighbor. We should always be more driven to service and knowing God then obtaining wealth and things. Sometimes it just seems that even we, as Christians, get that backwards.
As much as I liked some of the items that Pinsky mentioned a lot more stuck out to me as I watched the movie. What does community look like? This seems to be the buzz question amongst my friends and I, especially after attending a college that claims to have community. Community is like the animals near the end of the movie - right before the first wedding scene where Eric almost marries Ursala the sea witch. Community is Scuttle telling all of his friends that they need to go help Ariel and every single one of them following him without any question, dropping what they were doing. They each brought their special gifts and talents (that God gave them in design) to the situation and together they achieved the greater good.
I was watching the local news the few days ago and there was all of this buzz because local churches were working together for the first time to construct a Habitat for Humanity house and it was being built faster then any house in the area has been done before. While the anchor was singing the praises of these churches all I could think was isn't this what the Church should be doing all of the time? Bringing individuals and small churches under the banner of the Church to achieve something greater then we could on our own. When did everything become about the local church's ministries and not the Kingdom vision of all of us working together? What could we achieve if we would reclaim this vision of the community of the Church?
As many times as I've watched this movie, I've never been touched by the scene where King Triton substitutes himself for his daughter, taking her place in the contract she signed to give her life to the Sea Witch. Wow. Triton loved his daughter so much that he sacrificed everything - his Kingdom, his family, his power - just to save his one daughter (out of twelve). What is love leading us to do? Love was what hung Christ on the cross. We say we want to live like Christ but love isn't compelling us to do anything any more. I would venture a guess that most of our motives come from greed and selfish gain, the antithesis of love. An image used several times in the movie - most notably when a transformed Ursala is dancing on the dresser top - is that evil is embodied in getting what you want for selfish gain. Oh how evil is running through America today, if this is true.
While I found Triton's selfless giving to be moving, it just made me detest Ariel at the end of the movie. Was she not incredibly selfish to leave her Father who just sacrificed his life for her in order to go marry a man she fell in love with for his body and has known for less then a week? She's not going to get to spend time with her family anymore. All I could think was how often do we leave our Heavenly Father for the wrong reasons? We have this tendency to forget about his ultimate gift for us every time something "better" comes along to distract us.
The same line of thought came up when all of the souls were freed from Ursala, whom they had sold themselves to. Did you ever notice how many souls there were? Its overwhelming. And for what? To be more bulk as a man or skinner as a female (as alluded to at the beginning of the movie) or something material or antithetical to love? How often do we sell our souls to different things? What have you sold your soul to recently?
Finally, I had this idea as Ariel gave her voice to the Ursala. How much is that like the spiritual discipline of silence? Only with the spiritual discipline we are giving our voice to God, to whom it belongs, so we can listen to what he is actually trying to say to us. We need to learn to be less dependent on talking, especially in prayer, because it only reflects our self-absorbed nature. Why not let God actually have silence and space in which he can talk to us instead of constantly filling up the silence?

Monday, June 18, 2007

I just finished my candidacy guidebook, which is chalk full of all of these prayers. One line of one of the later prayers jumped out at me
"May I suffer for you"
This is a powerful statement in and of itself. But maybe, just maybe, your suffering for Christ isn't going to die in another country, but actually dealing with all of the pain from your past. To look back and face it, in order to reach out to others.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

The Cost of Following Christ - Luke 7:36 - 8:3

As I was preparing for this sermon I was batting around two different ideas so I asked some of my friends which sermon topic they would choose. One friend responded “We all know that the cost of following Christ is our lives, completely, but you need to preach on what that actually looks like.” As I toyed around with his words, agreeing with him at first, but then wondering if we really do know the high cost of following Christ.

In the first few verses from the passage in Luke we meet an unlikely guest at the Pharisees house. The gospel writer describes her as “a woman who lived a sinful life”. This is the last person that you expect to be at the home of a Pharisee. You have to wonder how she even got into the home. She had to have known that the Pharisees looked down upon her and considered her to be unclean. She was not allowed to be at the table with them, and could have probably been stoned for even entering. Yet, she made it through the door of the home and knelt before Jesus.

As she knelt at the feet of Christ she began to weep. When I imagine this scene, I see a woman so broken by her sin that she is lamenting her very presence before the Lord. She knows that she is not worthy to be before the Messiah, but she feels indebted to him. The tears are a mixture of shame, guilt, and pain.

So we have this weeping woman who is risking her very life by being in a home that she should not be in. She has made herself completely vulnerable to Jesus by kneeling and crying before him. And then she has the aduaticity to take down her hair and whip his feet, kissing them. All too often, as we have removed ourselves 21 centuries from this scene, we get a mixed up image of what the washing of feet actually looked like. Yes, people generally washed their feet when they entered a home, but they usually did this for themselves. Once in a while a person of high status would have a servant whip their feet, but it would be someone of the same gender. This woman has broken all of the cultural rules as to how a woman should approach a man. This would be equivalent to a Muslim woman unveiling her face to a stranger. This woman is intimately showing her love for Christ.

Could things get any stranger? Of course. She then takes the alabaster jar of perfume and poured it all over the feet. I don’t know about you, but I don’t handle the smell of perfume very well. The potency of even a few drops makes me cough, and this woman poured an entire jar over Jesus. The smell would have overtaken the entire house and the cost of this small token of love was just as overwhelming.

At this point the Pharisee standing off to the side had to have been in shock. A sinner has touched Jesus in an intimate way and has expressed love to him by offering this lavish, expensive gift. Why isn’t Jesus saying something to reprimand this woman?

And in Jesus’ style he told the Pharisee a parable of two men owing two different sized debts. One man was behind paying about 50 days worth of wages, but the other was behind 500 days worth of wages. Both couldn’t pay back the moneylender, but he canceled both of their debts. While both would have expressed gratitude the one with the larger debt would have been elated. Especially considering what would have happened if the moneylender wouldn’t had been forgiving; they would have been in debtors prison until they could pay off the debt. The chances of the person who owed 500 denari ever getting out did not look good.

At this point you can just imagine Jesus turning towards the woman still whipping his feet and acknowledging her debt, but also praising her for having enough strength for being in the presence of her very brokenness. Her love for Christ consumed her to act in ways that put her life at the mercy of Christ and all of the rest of the people in the room. She was truly grateful for the gift of being in Jesus’ presence. And there stood the Pharisee dumbstruck.

Fast forward to today and the intriguing comment my friend made. We very flippantly say today that the cost of following Christ is giving our entire lives, but do we really mean it? Do we have the genuine faith of this woman to put ourselves at the mercy of Christ?

I think this woman’s faith was best expressed not in her strong self-sufficient power, but her utter brokenness before Christ. When is the last time you were vulnerable before Christ? When was the last time you were vulnerable before other Christians? We are called to be the communal body of Christ, supporting each other when we have weaknesses. It takes the broken heart of Christ towards this woman to look favorably upon her shattered life. And it takes us being honest about our brokenness with others to be healed. It takes brokenness to heal brokenness. Ponder that statement for a few seconds. It took the broken body of Christ to heal us of our sins. But even on a very human level, we connect and can positively impact the lives of people who are struggling with things that we have struggled with. When we are working towards being healed, we offer hope to someone who only sees tears of frustration and pain. We offer much needed in sights to the people who are trying to hide from the tears by not acknowledging that anything is even wrong. But even knowing that it takes the broken to heal the broken, all too often we adopt the stance that we can make it on our own. We don’t need others. And we can’t bother Christ with our requests and ask for forgiveness unless things are really bad. And then we often feel too guilty to approach the throne of God. Somewhere between the word of God and today we have created this mis-construed idea that it is selfish to be broken before God. We may sing songs and pay lip service to being set free from our chains of our wrecked lives, but we don’t really know what it feels like to be recreated by God because we want to be in control of our own lives.

The cost of following Christ is giving up complete control to him. It is the hardest price that humans can pay – being vulnerable. We have been hurt so many times by other people and disappointed that we don’t want to give control to the Creator. And with every inch of our lives that we reclaim we are blocking God from turning our ashes into beauty. We fear that he will change us and we won’t like who we have become.

Here is the cost. Here is why it is hard. And because it is hard we often don’t pay the full price. We yearn for complete restoration in our lives, but we turn to God and say “not yet – let me have one more try”. And God lets us have “one more try” time after time after time. Today is the day to tell God that you don’t want to have one more try. Today is the day to look at the woman crying out to God and whipping his feet with her hair and pouring costly oil on him and say I want to be like her. And we need to pour out of ourselves the costly oil of pride. The gospel has good news for all immoral sinners, but it has nothing good to say to the prideful. The tricky thing about pride is that society epitomizes it. We need to achieve everything on our own so we can say that we climbed up the ladder by ourselves. This is antithetical to the teachings of Christ. He wants to make our yokes light, but our pride stands between us and him. So step one to following Christ is laying aside our pride.

Step two is to actually acknowledge our brokenness. God knows that we are broken already. He knows us intimately. And as the Christian community we know cognitively that we all are broken in one way or another. Yet, because we do not acknowledge our struggles with one another because of pride we are hindering each other and creating this feeling that we are alone in our sin. We are perpetuating the idea that we have to hide our sin. The church is where we come because our hearts our sick with sin. Hiding that does not make us righteous. If anything it just pollutes the entire concept of what the church is. When we acknowledge our sin with one another and to God we are letting it go and emptying ourselves so we can be filled with the things God wants for us.

And three, we need to claim who we are in the eyes of Christ. Shane Claiborne, a Christian author and activist, quoted one of his friends as saying “Listen, Jesus never talked to a prostitute because he didn’t see a prostitute. He just saw a child of God he was madly in love with.” There was no doubt in the woman mind from Luke’s gospel story today that God was madly in love with her as he forgave her of all of her sins, even when others labeled her as “a woman who lived a sinful life”. We need to start affirming that love within our body. We, the Church, are the tangible expression of the love of Christ and if that’s true we need to not look past labels and defining people by their sins ourselves, but we need to help others see that they are a child of God. We need to open up our eyes and hearts and see as God sees, see the beauty in the ashes. People who do not even know God have been created by him and have a piece of him inside of them that is waiting to be called out and acknowledged as God’s. Are we going to be the body of Christ that does that or are we going to be another organization that condemns in order to make ourselves look more holy?

Maybe the question in the sermon today should have been what is the reward for following Christ. But in order to be rewarded we must first pay the price. The price of laying aside our pride, acknowledging our brokenness, and seeing ourselves as God sees us. The cost of following Christ is high, but the rewards are higher. The reward of being redeemed and made beautiful and whole in the eyes of God. The cost is high and the road is hard, but God daily gives us the grace to take one step at a time.
Amen.

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Taking time to remember

Today I had the blessing of being in the car for about six-ish hours driving down to Annual Conference and back. It's been a long time since I've considered that much driving a blessing. Part of it has to do with the miracles of chiropractic care - wow, I think I have an addiction to being pain free. Amazing.

Because I could actually spend that much time in the car without wanting to pull over to the side of the road and cry I was struck by a few things
It took driving to realize how much I love the beauty of Central PA and couldn't think of any better place to be right now
It took going to annual conference and listening to the Bishop to remember why I love the UMC
It took listening to other speaks at conference to remind me that this is the denomination God is calling me to - this is where I belong
It took taking time to drive the speed limit to remind me of the blessings of patience for which I was rewarded with a gorgeous sunset (and as an added bonus I didn't swerve into the other lane of traffic when watching it - this is a HUGE accomplishment)

I think this is going to be a summer of reminders and discoveries.

Friday, June 1, 2007

When did we loose theology?

"The church is not a steeple. The church is not a resting place. The church is the people.
I am the church. You are the church. We are the church together!"

This is one of the first hymns that I ever learned, complete with hand motions (my favorite being "The church is the people" where you interlock your fingers and wiggle them.

As adults we still sing this song. In fact we sang it in church about two weeks ago. But I wonder if we actually think about the theology behind the words we sing. If we would we'd realize how far we've strayed from the idea that you and I are the church.

Earlier this week I was told that one of my ministries couldn't be advertised because it was in competition with another ministry and when people have choices, they might choose the wrong thing. Since when is church not about giving people options for discipleship. If I've learned anything in Spiritual Formations its that we each have a unique way to grow closer to God. There is no such this as cookie cutter discipleship and discipline.

When has the idea of a service once a week or a building replaced the Church - the people. I think this is at the root of a much bigger problem with our eschatology. We've went from the Kingdom being "present and not yet" to just "not yet". Forgot about actually doing something for the Kingdom today, no just work towards Heaven. Accept Christ then forget about him.

We need to start being the church again - being with each other, reaching out to those who don't know Christ, and healing the brokenness. We're selling our selves short, Body, when we miss the true meaning of the Church. A simple children's hymn gets it, why don't we?