Don’t cry for me Argentina

Don’t think from my past post that I am at all discouraged. I’m not. If anything, I find myself more deternined than ever to figure this thing out rather than just apathetically drifting into inaction and paralyzation. Here is a little encouragement for all of you who, like me, have a very hard time getting quiet enough to really pray. That cacophony is still prayer! 

From Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer by Barry and Ann Ulanov:

“If we can let ourselves go in prayer and speak all that is in our minds and hearts, if we can sit quietly and bear the silence, we will hear all the bits and pieces of ourselves crowding in on us, pleading for our attention. Prayer’s confession begins with this racket, for prayer is noisy with the clamor of all the parts of us demanding to be heard. The clamor is the sound of the great river of being flowing in us.”

Heaven, we have a problem

Today is the National Day of Prayer. I was a pastor for over a decade and today I lead a small church plant, and I only know today is the National Day of Prayer because I read about it in the paper. The article includes a study by the Pew Research Center (nice name) about the prayer habits of various faith groups. They asked people of all faiths if they prayed every day. The Jehovah’s Witnesses led the study with 89%. Then came Mormons at 82%, black evangelicals at 80%, white evangelicals at 78%, and Muslims at 71%. Catholics clocked in at 58%; Jews at 26%. According to the study, 5% of atheists pray every day. Do you?

First, let me say that I don’t put a lot of stock into surveys because along with praying every day, most people also lie every day—especially on surveys. The survey takers themselves suggested that 5% of the atheists may have just been “messing with the people doing the survey.” Jews have various requirements for what they consider prayer to be. They don’t recognize the short blessings they recite of meals and hand washings to be prayer. For many Jews, according to the article, prayer requires a minyan, or a gathering of ten adults. That could explain their low numbers.

Second, I feel the need to get real here. If three quarters of Americans are really praying every day—I’m not one of them. And if I—a Christian for a quarter century, pastor for thirteen years, current church planter and Christian publishing editor—struggle with being able to pray every day, I find it hard to believe that the rest of America is out there just praying away.

Now the hard part. Why don’t I pray every day? Good question. I guess the only answer is: after all these years, I still don’t really know how prayer works. I’m sorry. I don’t.

My friend John got sick a little over a year ago. Guy’s about my age. He had a liver transplant years before, but seemed to be through that. Then he just gets sick. We prayed for John to recover. John died. I’m okay with that. I’m not mad at God or anything. I trust that it was John’s time. But where did prayer fit into the whole thing? Did I really need to pray for John to recover? Was he going to die anyway? Was God waiting for me to pray before He’d do anything? Did John die because I didn’t pray hard enough? And, if healing John was the “right thing to do,” shouldn’t God heal John whether I pray or not? If it’s not the “right thing,” then John should die whether I pray or not. What is this little prayer game God is playing with us?

In Luke 18:1–7, it says,

Then He spoke a parable to them, that men always ought to pray and not lose heart, saying: “There was in a certain city a judge who did not fear God nor regard man. Now there was a widow in that city; and she came to him, saying, ‘Get justice for me from my adversary.’ And he would not for a while; but afterward he said within himself, ‘Though I do not fear God nor regard man, yet because this widow troubles me I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me.’” Then the Lord said, “Hear what the unjust judge said. And shall God not avenge His own elect who cry out day and night to Him, though He bears long with them?”

Really? Is that how it works? That’s kind of disappointing. Don’t you always hate it when those who complain the loudest get taken care of first? (Maybe you don’t if you’re a loud complainer.) Is that how God works? He waits to do something until we whine about it enough?

All in all, I do pray, but not nearly enough. Why not enough? Because even if I’m not sure what prayer is or how it works. When I read the words of Jesus, however, one thing is crystal clear: prayer matters. I don’t know how or why, but it just does. So, I can’t go on ignoring, avoiding, or putting off this thing called prayer.

So I’m going to pray today. I don’t really care that’s it’s the National Day of Prayer. But I’m going to pray anyway. We’ll see about tomorrow. If you pray, pray for me. If you want me to pray for you, let me know. I’m no expert, obviously, but I will. I promise.

In Need of Recovery

By Brian McLaren

For many people, economic recovery means getting back to where we were a few months or years ago. That means recovering our consumptive, greedy, unrestrained, undisciplined, irresponsible, and ecologically and socially unsustainable way of life. I’d like to suggest another kind of recovery, drawing from the world of addiction. When an addict gets into recovery, he doesn’t want to go back and recover the “high” he had before, or even to recover the conditions he had before he began using drugs and alcohol. Instead, he wants to move forward to a new way of life—a wiser way of life that takes into account his experience of addiction. He realizes that his addiction to drugs was a symptom of other deeper issues and diseases in his life—unresolved pain or anger, the need to anesthetize painful emotions, lack of creativity in finding ways to feel happy and alive, unaddressed relational and spiritual deficits, lack of self-awareness, and so on.

Similarly, I’d like to suggest whenever we hear the word “recovery,” we as a nation see it not as a call to get back our old addictive high, but rather as a call to face our corporate and personal addictions, including the following:

1. Our addiction to carbon. Fossil fuels are an addictive substance. They give us speed, quick energy, serving as a kind of cultural amphetamine. Meanwhile, they toxify our environment and throw the ecosystem in which we live into dangerous imbalance.

2. Our addiction to weapons. Weapons give us a feeling of well-being and security, removing our feelings of fear and anxiety, much like a barbiturate. But like a drug, they make us lazy and slow in the much more important work of relationship-building, justice, and peace-making—lazy in seeking the common good. And they plunge us into an addictive cycle, because if everyone in the world is getting more and more weapons, we aren’t safer … especially when increasing numbers of those weapons are nuclear, biological, and chemical.

3. Our addiction to fear. Religious leaders, media leaders, and political leaders have all discovered that you can raise quick votes, dollars, and members through the hallucinogenic stimulant of fear. By making straights afraid of gays, conservatives afraid of progressives, Christians and Jews afraid of Muslims, citizens afraid of immigrants, and vice versa, these leaders get a quick organizational high—”crack” for their unity and morale. But the more fear you pump into your system, the more fear you have, and pretty soon, you go from being stimulated to paranoid, seeing things that aren’t there and missing things that are. And soon after that, you move from paranoia to paralysis, leaving you in greater danger than ever.

4. Our addiction to stuff. Jesus said that a person’s life doesn’t consist in the abundance of her possessions. An economy that measures growth by the number of durable goods (resources) extracted from the environment and turned into non-durable goods that are bought, used, and then thrown away into a landfill … that economy “succeeds” by turning goods into trash, and calling it success. That’s not success. We need to imagine moving beyond an extractive, consumptive economy to a sustainable economy, and beyond a sustainable economy to a regenerative economy. I believe that in God’s world, if billions can be made destroying the planet and exploiting people addictively, trillions can be made caring for the planet wisely and caring for people justly.

5. Our addiction to a single bottom line. During the president’s town hall meeting, a man from Indiana told how he started a solar-powered attic fan company, and how he chose not to ship manufacturing overseas, but instead, to provide good employment for his neighbors. That meant, he said, that he had a little less cash in his pocket … but wouldn’t you agree that being a good neighbor has a value that can’t be measured in dollars? The single bottom line of financial profit is addictive, and like an addiction, it destroys families and communities. We need to rediscover a triple bottom line—financial sustainability, social sustainability, and economic sustainability. So we need a recovery of family values, and we also need a recovery of community values, and neighborly values, and ethical business values.

6. Our addiction to easy answers. “Government is the problem.” “Just throw money at the problem.” We can’t afford our addiction to these kinds of easy ideological slogans and facile reactive fantasies in a complex, real world. Ideology is, in many ways, a drug that substitutes the quick high of unthinking reaction for the hard work of acquiring wisdom.

So … maybe we can sabotage our addictive tendencies by letting the word “recovery” have a meaning that wakes us up rather than drugs us into the comfortable, dreamy, half-awareness in which we have lived for too long. That’s my hope and prayer.

Brian McLaren is a speaker and author, most recently of Everything Must Change and Finding Our Way Again. This piece is taken from the God’s Politics blog at Sojourners and from Inward/Outward.

Have you been inspired lately??

This is my friend, Ben Hardt, who put out an album almost two years ago with the string arrangements of our housemate, Chris Massa.

What he did inspires me. Quit his job and went for a dream.

Check it out if you’re looking for some good new music. He’s on iTunes.

We’ve met the enemy, and it is us

It’s easy to get angry and start blaming people for the financial mess we are in. Glad to see the markets up around 500 pts today, but for some reason I still doubt that we’ve hit bottom. I hope we have. I fear we haven’t.

To really get a grasp on how screwed up our financial system is and how messed up those who are responsible for overseeing it are… I beg you to read this article in Rolling Stone.

Believe me… Wall Street and Fed are counting on the fact that you are either too busy to read it or to dumb to understand it. Truth is, you won’t understand all of it, but plow through it. It’s your civic duty.

This article will make you angry. But let’s remember our part. There’s a graph I saw recently comparing Consumer Debt (mortgages/loans/credit cards) to our Gross Domestic Product (GDP–the dollar value of all goods and services produced within a country’s borders in a given year). From 1940 until the early 1980s, consumer debt was below 50% of the GDP. By the late 1990s it crept up to 70%. From 2000 to 2008, it shot up to, you guessed it, 100%. That’s right. As citizens of this country, we now owe as much as the nation produces. Oh, there was a year in history when we were also at the 100% level. You guessed it again… 1929.

Yup… we became the wealthiest and most prosperous nation in the history of world by financing it. We put it on the card. We wrote a big, fat I.O.U. to buy our houses and SUVs and vacations and appliances and electronics. Now we want to blame the politicians and bankers. Well, unless you can easily pay off your debt in a few months, you’ve fed into the problem as well.

An what does Congress want the banks to do with all that bailout money?? Start lending it! Open the lines of credit. Start the borrowing again so the economy can roar back.

Maybe the worst is behind us. Maybe the Dow is just going to keep roaring up the charts. But I look at this chart and things don’t look so good.

Maybe the best thing we can do is stop the madness. Slow your spending way down, even if you’re not in financial hot water. When you do spend, shop local if possible. Mom and pop places. Put your money in the hands of local folk instead of big corporations and banks. Why buy a new car when a used one is just as good? And send a little of what you don’t spend to the charities caring for those who have nothing.

And if you don’t know them, get to know your neighbors. You just might need them one day… or they may need you.

Cactus League Baseball

Sure, the starters are out by the sixth 

inning. Sure, players in the later innings have numbers in the 80s and 90s. Sure, some players run 

 

wind sprints in the outfield during the game. Nothing counts. Wins and losses don’t mean a thing. But it sure is nice to be watching a little baseball in the warm Phoenix sun.

It only happens nine times a century!

That’s right. It’s Square Root Day.  Wear the pocket protector and slide rule proudly today, my friend.

3/3/09

You probably already missed 1/1/01 and 2/2/04. So, mark you calendars now for the next occurances so you won’t be caught unaware:

4/4/16

5/5/25

6/6/36

7/7/49

8/8/64 

9/9/81   (Can’t wait for this one!)

 

p.s.  – And can you set your cruise control for 26.019223662515374903266289250538 mph???

Faith, Seeds, and God’s Sometimes Confusing Word

For the past several months, we’ve been reading through the book of Luke on Sunday mornings. Not a sermon really. I want us to discuss it. Tackle it. Deny it. Spar over it a bit. Take it apart and put it back together. I may bring a few notes and certainly I can always be found to have an opinion about anything, but often the discussions venture down paths I didn’t foresee.

In doing this, I’ve noticed that there are many passages in the Bible that you never hear preached. 2 Peter 3:15-16 says, “ Our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand…”

Don’t you love it that Scripture says Scripture can be hard to understand? Takes the pressure off. It’s supposed to be hard. It’s okay.

“I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.” (Luke 16:9)

Yikes! Preach on that!

“The Law and the Prophets were proclaimed until John. Since that time, the good news of the kingdom of God is being preached, and everyone is forcing his way into it. It is easier for heaven and earth to disappear than for the least stroke of a pen to drop out of the Law. Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.” (Luke 16:16-19)

Hello! Non sequitur. Where did that marriage bit come from? Unfortunately, verses like this can often be pulled out of the context, where Jesus is trying to make a point, and made into hurtful doctrine.

“No one lights a lamp and puts it in a place where it will be hidden, or under a bowl. Instead he puts it on its stand, so that those who come in may see the light. Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are good, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are bad, your body also is full of darkness. See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness. Therefore, if your whole body is full of light, and no part of it dark, it will be completely lighted, as when the light of a lamp shines on you.” (Luke 11:33-36)

I got the first part. Don’t hide my lamp. But the second part… my body full of light… no part of it dark… completely lighted, as when a lamp shines on you. Wha? Kind of Zen-like isn’t it. Also disconcerting. I don’t know about you but I think I will always be found with a few dark corners within me. Either way, it’s fun times breaking these down with a group.

Other times, you may see a passage in a completely new light. Like this past week, for example. Most of us have heard the verse from Luke 17:6, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed [pictured], you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.”

Sure, in other Gospels it is a mountain instead of a mulberry tree, but without using your hands, it’s still a pretty nifty trick. David Copperfield could build a TV special around it.

Haven’t you normally associated this verse with having more faith? Or with more effective faith? Have you ever said to yourself, If I only had more faith. Or, If I only had that guy’s faith. In context though, this verse reads much differently to me:

“If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. If he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, ‘I repent,’ forgive him.”

The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!”

He replied, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.” (verses 3-6)

First, I love it that after being chided for having more forgiveness, the apostles yell at him, “Give us more faith!”

But look at Jesus’ reply. Is he giving them more faith? If anything, he tells them that they could get by with a fraction of faith. The crucial detail here does not seem to be amount. He seems to imply that we already have all we need–maybe even more than we need. Perhaps, instead of sitting on the sidelines waiting for some mysterious package of additional faith to someday arrive, we should be out there using what little we have.

What do you think?

A Good Sunday

So I guess I originally billed this blog as a commentary on building a faith community (okay, a church, I guess) in the recovering, urban, Pittsburgh neighborhood of Lawrenceville. I haven’t really had much to share on it. Most of the time we feel like missionaries who have dropped into a foreign land to start church building by scratch. This is a very unchurched area that hasn’t really missed church a bit.

Bit by bit, month by month, we have just pounded out the values of community. We now have a solid group of around six, plus my wife and me. These folks are regulars. They see Catalyst, as we call it, as their church. If we stopped, most of them probably wouldn’t go anywhere else. This winter, we connected with Jennifer, a woman who provides family services for the poorer folks of our corner of Pittsburgh. Jenn works for a large medical provider, but they don’t provide her with much help, other than an office and salary. She struggles to meet all the needs… food on family tables, money for the gas bill, school supplies, or kid’s Christmas presents for parents with nothing. She gets some donations, but by December 15th, she’s usually tapped out. This Christmas, our little community was able to put over $400 together for gift cards to grocery stores, Target, and Toys R Us. Not a lot. Our people are far from wealthy. But for Jennifer, it was huge. When I called her, she was in a home, de-licing it. Jenn’s work is very hands on. We will continue to help her when we can.

This last Sunday was special. It was the second visit for our 9th “member.” I’ll call her Lisa.  She works at Starbucks with one of our other folks. She was raised in community churches but hasn’t been to any church in over two years. She’s in her early twenties, and her family is self-destructing beneath her with bad choices and toxic behavior. She feel alone and helpless. She has seen the church as “programmed religion.” I think she has wondered if God is even there at all. Or if it is all just a show people put on. Probably still wonders that, to some extent. This Sunday, her second time with us, she found someone else with similar struggles. She broke down as she shared how isolated and betrayed she feels. We prayed. We laughed. We cried. Then we ate together. I think we had church. We definately had community. I think Lisa is going to come back.

We’re at nine. But sometimes, nine can feel huge.

A New Day

I’m working today and can’t watch the inauguration. Thank God for DVRs!  I am thinking about it alot today. I must admit, even though I really don’t trust Republicans or Democrats any farther than I can throw them, I still find myself hopeful and encouraged in government more than ever before. Why??

• I believe Obama will join the small cadre of truly remarkable and iconic presidents: Washington, Lincoln, FDR, and Kennedy. This only happens when a truly unique and charismatic figure faces daunting challenges. Not that he will do everything right (the other four didn’t) but I think he’s the right kind of figure at the right time in history. Either way, it’s kind of fun to be here and witness it.
• I believe Obama represents the victory of intellect and reason over politics and ideology. From all he has said and done so far, it seems he is following the Lincoln strategy of getting the brightest minds in the room, even if they disagree with you, and coming up with the best ideas. It’s not about following a party playbook (like several past presidents of both parties) or eliminating all voices of dissent (as the Bush crowd did ). Obama is not afraid to have his ideas challenged, in fact I think he sort of enjoys it.
• Like Kennedy (the first president born after 1900), Obama represents a new generation (the first president born after 1960). It is certainly something that he is black (in his lifetime there were still separate washrooms, drinking fountains, and swimming pools for blacks in this country), but he is not of the Civil Rights crowd. He is not a former pastor. He is not fighting for the black cause. He is simply a brilliant politician who happens to be black. When you ask him about Affirmative Action, he replies that he doesn’t believe his daughters will need it. When you ask him about reparations, his eyes glaze over. If he disappoints anyone, I think he’s more apt to disappoint the left who have great plans for finally being in charge. He’s not the angry black man who is finally getting his turn. He is simply a statesman.
• Despite the last point, there is no doubt he is an incredible role model for young black men who have had very few—mainly athletes, evangelists, and rap stars. He represents the triumph of education, family, responsibility, and the power of being a good communicator. Move aside Charles Barkley, Michael Jordan, and Puff Daddy.
• Despite him being American through and through, his ties to the third world (Indonesia and Africa) are significant. The world, for the most part, ignores these areas. I mean, other than Australia, there’s never even been an Olympics held south of the equator. It’s like it doesn’t exist. Yet, because of issues of population and the availability of food, oil, and fresh water, these are going to be critical areas in the future. I just think our interactions with the world will be different now that we don’t have a gray-haired, rich white man in the office.
• Even though right wing radio continues to call him a socialist (mainly due to the fact that it would be in their best interest for it to be so), corporate leaders like the CEO of GE on MSNBC this morning, are coming away from him impressed by the clarity by which he talks on issues of economics, business, and the state of the world.
• Best of all… Obama is the first Geek President.  He is an avid texter and Blackberry addict. He grew up reading Spiderman comic books. And when he recently met Leonard Nemoy, he did so with the Vulcan salute.  Awesome. 

I know the hero worship has been a bit much—he IS in a major honeymoon period after a president with record low approval. Maybe he will disappoint. Maybe he will have an affair, sell off Hawaii to Indonesia, spy for Al Qaeda, and put a big red star atop the Washington Monument. I fear there are those who are cheering for that. But I don’t think it will be the case. I think it is more fun and less stressful to be hopeful.

Plus, I think more than with Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II—presidents who will fade into the obscurity of the past like Fillmore, Harding, and Taft—we are witnessing something of true historical significance.

I don’t know. That’s just what I’m thinking today.