As Good As It Gets

"This is as good as it gets."

This was the sentiment I heard recently on Easter Sunday. It was the main idea of the Easter Sunday sermon, as a matter of fact. "This is as good as it gets."

If the implication had been that this is as good as church gets, then I'd probably agree. Christmas, Easter, and Mother's Day are usually the highest attendance Sundays at most churches, everybody's dressed up, lots of nice smelling flowers, etc. Yeah, Easter Sunday may be about as good as church gets.

But this is not quite what this person meant. The message was that the Resurrection of Jesus and the fruits of it that we see here today are, in fact, the very best God has to offer us. What we see here and now is, according to this person, the escatological apex of God's creation.

I'm sorry but if the here and now are as good as it gets, if this is the culmination of God's plan then I'm out! If the Resurrection is the end of the story then we're all screwed.

Yes, Easter Sunday is nice. For those of us that get to participate, that is. I can afford a nice suit and tie so I won't be embarassed to show up to church with all the other nicely dressed people. I can celebrate this Holy Day with my whole family, none of whom are estranged, dead before their time, or otherwise unable to join us. I can afford to go out to a nice Easter brunch with more nicely dressed people. It's easy for me to sit back and say that this is as good as it gets.

But what about the person who's just lost a child and seeing happy families together is a painful reminder of their loss? What about those who have experienced a tragedy that makes it difficult for them to even believe in a loving God? What about those who just plain don't feel welcome inside a church building? I don't think that Easter Sunday at a suburban church would feel like "as good as it gets" to everyone.

Thankfully the message of Easter is not "this is as good as it gets", but "this is a foretaste of something so good you can't even imagine". The Resurrection of Jesus is a sign to us that just as violence and death did not have the last word for Jesus, so they will not have the last word for us. As some of my professors are fond of saying, the hope of the Resurrection is the hope of God's "already/not yet" kingdom. Here and now is not as good as it gets. It gets better.

Marx was critical of the "things will get better notion", and rightly so. When he said that religion is the opiate of the masses he was critcizing the government's use of eschatological hope to make the lower classes complacent about their present situation.

To spiritualize the "it gets better" message of Easter and say that the hope is only for a nice place in the clouds after we die is to miss the point entirely. The hope of Easter is that the Kingdom of God can begin today. Jesus' body didn't disappear and leave a note that says "see you in heaven". His body was raised to show that this world will be redeemed. There is, in fact, hope for creation on this side of death!

Yes, Easter Sunday is pretty good for many of us. Perhaps it's even the best we've seen thus far. For those of us that do have it good on Easter Sunday we have the simultanious hope and challenge of Jesus' resurrection. Those who suffer will now begin to see a brighter day, and we are charged to play a part in making that brighter day happen.

This is not as good as it gets. The best is yet to come. Thanks be to God.

William Sloane Coffin

Sorry I haven't been posting much lately. This is the time of the semester when everything comes due. I have some thoughts on eschatology related to Easter Sunday that I'll get to soon.

For those that don't know, William Sloane Coffin passed away last week. He was the Sr. Pastor of Riverside Church in NYC for many years, and a tireless crusader for civil rights. Probably the most articulate communicator of liberal Protestantism of the twentieth century, he will be greatly missed.

Here are links to his obituary from The New York Times and a tribute from Jim Wallis in Sojurners.

If you see any other good articles about his life, please leave links to them in comments.

Easter Greetings

Happy Easter! Here's an interpretation of the scene on the first Easter morning from our friends at The Brick Testament.

Podcasting

Short post this time, I promise.

There are some new developments with The Gathering I want to share with everyone. First of all, we're getting some nice free publicity from Austin Audio, the folks that installed our sound system at church. They ask the pastors of churches they work with to do their radio commericals, so they can plug the company and their church at the same time. I went and recorded one last week, so you should hear our commercial in pretty heavy rotation on 94FM "The Fish" in Nashville.

Also, we've begun podcasting on The Gathering's website. Unfortunately we can't put the entire services online because of copyright issues, but the messages are there for free download. You can check them out here.

That's all for now. Have a blessed Holy Week.

Philosophy of "RENT"

For those that don't know, I'm a rather rabid fan of the musical "RENT". The movie was good, but the stage production is still where it's at. I recently read a memoir by one of the original Broadway cast members, Anthony Rapp. He played Mark and reprised the role in the film. The book is called Without You and I highly recommend it.

But I'm not writing ad copy here, so I'll get to the point. In "RENT" there's a support group called "Life Support" that several of the characters attend because they have AIDS. The affirmation of this group is (sing it with me!)

There's only us, there's only this,
Forget regret or life is yours to miss,
No other road, no other way,
No day but today

We hear this affirmation sung a number of times throughout the show. I really like it because it affirms living in the moment, which is something I believe to mix well with my faith as a Christian. More about that in a minute.

It turns out that Life Support is based on a real group in New York called "Friends In Deed". As I read about this group and its influence on the show I realized that I interpreted "No day but today" in a very different way than it was original intended.

Long story short, this group is very fatalistic. They say there are no accidents in life and that things happen exactly as they should happen. So all we can do when faced with pain and loss is try to accept this reality of the universe and view our hurts in context of the impermanence of all things.

I don't totally agree with this worldview, but neither do I totally disagree. I'm intrigued by the idea that things happen as they "should". Does that imply some kind of master planner behind all of this? The parts of the book that involve Friends In Deed don't ever discuss God, so I'm going to assume that God is probably not a major part of their conversation. That's not necessarily a bad thing, by the way. But fatalism without some master planner seems like a post-modern, Nietzsche-infused brand of Reformed Calvinism. A strange marriage, to be sure.

I interpret "No day but today" as more of a cry of salvation/liberation from life circumstances that imprison us. I hear lots of people say "live like there's no tomorrow" meaning "make the most of today". I totally agree with that.

I believe that Jesus would add to that "live each day like it's your first". The Christian faith understands salvation as liberation from the negative effects of previous separation from God. In Christ we know a limitless future, and each day is our first.

If every day is your first day, then you are not bound by the things from your past: broken relationships, abuse, and other kinds of heartaches and victimization. If today is your very first day then the possibilities are endless. You don't have to cram everything in to today because this is the last one you'll ever get (although that may well be the case). If every day is the first day of the rest of your life, you are truly free.

If nothing else, "No day but today" is a cry of freedom. "There is no future, there is no past." The past is gone, and the future is not guaranteed. If we live each day like it's definitely our first, and maybe our last, there is no limit to the kind of life we can create.

No day but today.

Nickel and Dimed

Here are the highlights of an email conversation between myself, my fiancee, Jessica, and her father (my soon-to-be father-in-law), Jerry. The topic is some issues raised by Barbara Ehrenrich's book, Nickel and Dimed, particularly on the issue of a living wage. For those unfamiliar with the term, a living wage is a wage that covers the basic cost of living in a particular community, which is significantly higher than the current federally mandated minimum wage. Here are some highlights of the conversation:

Jessica:
An interesting aspect of the problem, that I was unaware of, is that many poor cannot afford to save enough of their paycheck from week to week to pay a deposit or one month's rent up front to get an apartment, and end up spending far more in the long run by living in cheap motels, paying by the day or the week. If it were me, I'd probably live in my car for the weeks necessary to save up, and I'm sure some do. The author also marveled at how her coworkers never expressed any interest in demanding more pay, despite the fact that they were missing meals, living in cars, and working two and three jobs. She concludes that this is partly because these low-wage jobs (she worked as a waitress, hotel housekeeper, maid, nursing home cafeteria worker, and at Wal-Mart) are so degrading to a person's spirit that the people come to believe they are only worth $7 an hour, and partially because the companies tend to avoid any sort of negotiation-period in the hiring process.

Jerry:
I'm intrigued by the phrase "so degrading to a person's spirit that the people come to believe they are only worth $7 an hour." Could the reason her "coworkers never expressed any interest in demanding more pay" is they realize they goofed off in school haven't done anything in their life to make themselves more valuable to an employer? The reason "the companies tend to avoid any sort of negotiation-period in the hiring process" is because there are so many people willing to take the job who realize "they goofed off in school and haven't done anything in their life to make themselves more valuable to an employer". It is about what every farmer knows: "the law of the harvest". If you don't plant good seed, fertilize and cultivate, you aren't going to harvest much of a crop. You reap what you sow. Wasn't there a time when you truly valued personal responsibility? Farmers don't get a bumper harvest by negotiating with mother nature. We should all help people on a personal level, but don't ask companies - or government for that matter - to be the "Big Eraser" that wipes away a lifetime of sloth and unwillingness to do much to improve themselves.

Jessica:
I certainly believe in personal responsibility to pursue one's own advancement (though I think you are making a gross generalization to say that those who work for minimum wage "goofed off" in school. Many branches of society, it seems, do not have a status quo that assumes people will go to college. It is just not an option, or one is expected to go straight to work instead.) Still, while personal responsibility is a must for achieving certain goals in life, such as higher education or a more prestigious job, I believe it is the responsibility of a civil society to make sure that those willing to work in the least prestigious, lowest paying jobs can at least feed and shelter their families with what they earn working one full-time job. How can a person better themselves through education if they are working 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, just to have enough to eat and pay for a hotel room by-the-week? Poverty is undoubtedly a cycle, and low standards of education and work ethic in certain communities certainly play a large part in that cycle, but the condition of living chronically hand-to-mouth also prohibits the opportunities one might otherwise seize to advance themselves. What you term "a lifetime of sloth" may apply to some people, but certainly not to those working three jobs and yet still not earning enough to survive. As to your belief in personal aid, but not in more comprehensive or programmatic efforts, an allegory quoted by many activists should apply: If you see a bunch of babies floating down a river, you could pull them out one by one, but you solve the problem by going upstream and finding out how they are dropping into the river in the first place. (i.e. looking at the reason people are poor will rescue more people from poverty than helping on an individual basis.) I tend to think of it in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. One cannot focus on the next higher level unless the lower, broader needs are met. For instance, people cannot focus on education or intellectual challenges unless they have sufficient food, sleep, shelter, and safety.

Matt:
I think it's very easy to have these kinds of conversations and take positions that offer simple explanations for these problems when the people who are actually affected by them remain nameless, faceless abstractions. Liberals have an easy time blaming the corporate bigwig when they don't know or appreciate the tremendous responsibility executives of large corporations deal with. Conservatives have an easy time saying that poor people are lazy when they've never actually met one or walked in their shoes. (Even this statement is an abstraction, because no one in this conversation is taking such a simplistic stance) I've been fortunate enough to get to know a number of people who live an entirely different world than I do even though they reside less than 200 miles from where I grew up. The first time I went to Mountain TOP I was 13 and seeing the way some of these people lived caused me to reevaluate much of what I'd always believed. I became extremely grateful for the many advantages I'd been given. I don't have much sympathy for those who've had as many or more advantages than me and have still chosen to engage in "a lifetime of sloth", because they live quite a comfortable life in the White House. ;) Seriously, though, massive generalizations become much more difficult when these complex social problems begin to have a name and a face. Perhaps we should take a break from assigning blame to one group or another for the problem of poverty and take time to suffer with those who suffer from the cycle of intense poverty. In Matthew 25 Jesus didn't say "you saw me naked and hungry and knew exactly who to blame". He said the sheep on his right fed and clothed those they saw in need not because they were victimized by the system or it was the "right thing to do", but because those who suffer are as much of a child of God as are we, and if the tables were turned we'd sure like it if someone was willing to help us.

Jerry:
Regardless of where we are or how we got here as a society, the fact is that we are moving toward a borderless and "flat" world. A government, ours or anyone else's, can't long ignore the facts of the free market. It is, therefore, incumbent on individuals to give of their time, talent and money to relieve suffering. If a government or business or society pays an above-market wage, there is always a cost to be borne by someone. Ultimately, the cost - of either taxes or wages - is passed along to the consumer. If the consumer can buy something at a lower cost from a company based in a country that doesn't abide by the "civil society" standard (e.g. China, Taiwan, Philippines, India, etc.), they will do so. That leaves the company located in the "civil society" at a disadvantage; hence many of our manufacturing, technology and customer service jobs going overseas. Wal-Mart, at least while Sam Walton was alive, tried to buy American. It became increasingly difficult for them to do that and maintain "everyday low prices". They have basically abandoned the Buy American philosophy. It is not in the realm of reason that a government or "civil society" can afford to guarantee "those willing to work in the least prestigious, lowest paying jobs can at least feed and shelter their families with what they earn working one full-time job." I am working in an environment that is a microcosm of that; it is called state government. When the amount of one's pay, including annual raises and benefits, is detached from the quality and quantity of work performed, there is no incentive for anyone to do more than show up and stay out of trouble. The ultimate result of any guarantee is that performance - quality and productivity - suffers. I'm not saying it is the way things ought to be, simply that it is the way things are.

Matt:
I'm with you on the way things are, Jerry, and I appreciate that it's easier to proclaim lofty ideals from my position as opposed to yours, where you deal with these concrete realities every day. I would only suggest that there may be some as-of-yet un-thought-of 'middle way' between Adam Smith-esque radical free market-ism and the neo-Marxist concept of equal pay for everyone, which has been demonstrated not to work. For people to actually count on being able to make a living wage it will, of course, take more than one piece of legislation. It will take a very serious re-thinking on the part of our society about what value "the market" (which I think is occasionally used as a smoke screen for individual greed) places on certain jobs, particularly those of CEOs, athletes, and entertainers. This rethinking will require people to actually embrace the idea that we are not individual monads, as the modernist project has told us, but that we are in fact in a symbiotic relationship with all humanity and all of God's creation. An idea which, I would suggest, is pervasive in scripture. Will this actually happen in our lifetime, let alone at any point in human history? The cynical side of me says no because the hallmark of sinful humanity is our incredible ability to construct our own reality where we are the demi-gods of our little world. That being the case, I read Matthew 25 as an explicit call from God for us to do everything we can to make this world more like the Kingdom God has promised us "is at hand".


If you're still reading by this point I thank you. Jerry, Jessica, and myself are all people of deep faith and compassion, and we have arrived at our differing viewpoints guided by our faith. Obviously, then, this is not a black-and-white issue. I'd love comments if you have any to share.

The Madness in March

The NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament is upon us once again, meaning that my yearly ritual of sitting on the couch, consuming high calorie snacks and beverages, and tallying up my brackets to make sure that I picked the right upsets this year. I've done this for years, but in the last few years the NCAA Tournament has taken on an additional significance unrelated to basketball.

In 2003 I was a Senior in college, and my friends and I gathered for four straight days of college basketball just as the invasion of Iraq began. We had seen on the news that tensions were mounting and that Bush was going to give the order any day. I was and remain opposed to the war, an attitude my friends did not share with me.

The bombing actually began on Thursday, the opening day of the tournament. Rather than interrupt the basketball action, every time the games went to commerical Dan Rather popped on the screen and began showing us more footage of the bombing of Baghdad. The camera had it's night vision lens on, so everything had this strange green glow to it.

My friends, no doubt encouraged by the "over 21" beverages we were consuming, cheered every time the saw in explosion. They yelled "Oh (expletive), run!" and other cries of fear in mock-Arabic accents to amuse the rest of the guys. I have to admit I laughed a little bit. I love silly voices. And although I didn't actively participate in cheering for the bombing footage, I didn't object to it either. I mostly just sat there, transfixed, because this was all so surreal.

Reflecting on this later I realized that to a bunch of fraternity guys like us, everything we saw that day was one giant video game. We spent a lot of time playing sports video games with one another, and when we got tired of those we'd put in Halo or another one of these battle simulation games were the object is to cause as much death and destruction as possible. All of us, myself included, were living in a matrix of our own making, so removed from reality where we arrived at a point where footage of bombs falling on a large city, no doubt killing more civilians than members of Saddam's regime, was entertaining to us.

None of these people had names or faces to us. We never saw the orphaned children or people with severe burns. I can't help but wonder if we in America have so entertained ourselves to death that we are unable to recognize the suffering of others. Perhaps occasionally we need to pry our overweight butts of the couch and do something to relieve the suffring in our own backyard. When those that suffer greatly begin to have names and faces, the problem is no longer some abstract, giant video game for us to laugh at. The problem involves real humans, fellow children of God who by chance of birth drew a different lot in life than we did. I pray that God will help us to wake up from our self constructed, escapist realitites and recognize not only the depth of suffering in the world, but our part in alleviating it.

Idealism

First of all, I have to say that the first Sunday of The Gathering went very well. We had 90 folks, 26 of them visitors, 9 of them first timers. We've hit the ground with good momentum, so we have to work hard to keep it going. Please keep me, the team, and this new ministry in your prayers.

Now to my musings for the day...

I get accused of being young and idealistic at times. Guilty as charged. I'm a 25 year old preacher, what do you expect? The idea of being young and idealistic is not what bugs me though. It's the implication that I'll get over it one day and be a disallusioned "real adult". I'll one day realize that things never change, so don't waste my energy trying.

The problem is that I know plenty of "real adults" who are very idealistic and still believe that things can change for the better. So I have to ask, what's the difference between them and all the burned out people? What did they do that allowed them to keep their dreams alive? I've asked these folks, and none of them has a concrete answer. Everybody's story is different. I don't believe in easy answers for anything, but there has to be some kind of common trait that carried these folks through.

I've sat with this question for about five years now, which is a long time for someone my age. I'm beginning to think that learning patience might have something to do with it. People that are young and idealistic likemyself tend to get frustrated when they realize how complex problems are and/or when they don't see change happening as quickly as they'd like.

But that's not a trait only the young and idealistic posess. Our whole society is impatient. Just look at how we give a new President 100 days in office until we plunge their approval ratings into the basement because they haven't turned the country into the utopia they promised us. We live in an instant gratification society that does not value patience.

What if those "real" adults who lost their idealism are just like the young and idealistic in that they never learned patience? It's true, things don't change as quickly as we'd like them to. Most problems are much more complex than our quick fix solutions would suggest. Maybe those people that manage to be idealistic have learned to be patient and see things through. Maybe they've learned not to pound the table so much and push on through frustration and adversity. Maybe they've learned to pick their battles and maintain their priorities. Maybe these are the people that will ultimately make the difference in the end.

I'm still tossing this idea around in my head, but I think there may be something to it. I feel like I've learned more patience in the last few years, and I know I will have to learn loads more to stay the course in the years to come.

Zero Hour

Well, The Gathering starts tomorrow. No going back now. I'm simultaniously excited and scared to death, as you might imagine. On the one hand I'm finally getting to do what I've wanted for years- leading innovative worship for a community that is not content with the status quo, and getting to preach every Sunday. On the other hand I'm very aware of how much effort has gone into all of this, how many people are personally invested in it, and how Crievewood has taken a major risk in starting this new ministry. I don't want to let any of these people down.

I suppose a healthy dose of fear is a good thing, because I'll be more likely to remember to depend on God to guide me through this rather than trusting in my own abilities (which I tend to think too highly of most of the time).

Here's the link to the site: The Gathering

Live the Stories

I heard a sermon recently called "Live the Stories". The gist of it was that while the Jews who crossed the Jordan into Israel were not the ones who left Egypt (that whole golden calf incident), the stories of the previous generation were a part of their lived experience because they heard these stories told over and over, and it was very real to them. The application, of course, being that we, too, should make the narratives of the Bible part of our lived experience by immersing ourselves in these stories.

It wasn't so much the content (although it was good) as the presentation that has kept me thinking about this. The sermon was delivered by a PhD student in Homiletics at Vanderbilt who is a very gifted speaker. He did the whole sermon in first person as a child who was born during the 40 years in the desert, and in doing so painted such a vivid word picture that the poetry seemed to seep out of his pores like one who has worked up a great sweat.

While the central message was deep and the presentation artful, I was left unmoved. Perhaps this was just my brain going into academic mode, critiquing his exegesis, or my preacher self sizing up a colleague. Whatever the case, I didn't find myself moved in the way that lets me know I am truly worshiping God.

But when the sermon was over a woman stood up and began to sing "Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?" a capella (no piano or anything accompanying her). The song paints a very simple picture of Jesus' suffering, and has never really moved me, but this time I absolutely melted. Every inflection in her voice as she sang told us of the pain she felt watching these terrible things happen to Jesus. Even though she was born 2,000 years after the fact, she was there, and she took me with her. I was there when they crucified my Lord.

As God is so fond of doing, I was smacked upside the head with a simple but profound truth. God seems to have given me a gift with words, and I'm usually a little too proud of that fact, showing it off even when no one asks. But in this moment it was not the abundance of artful, poetic language, but the simplicity of an old slave spiritual that transported me back to that day at Calvary. Less turned out to be more.

That day the song was the sermon to me. It was in the song that I began to experience the old, old story as if I had been there.

I must have a sign on my forehead

For the majority of my life I've known I was different, and everyone else has known it, too. It's not what you might think, though. I hope I don't sound arrogant by saying this, but it's as if people have looked at me as a pastor all my life. Even when I was a kid people would come to me if they had issues or were wrestling with big questions about God, as if I had any clue. It was like I had a sign on my forehead that said "The pastor is in" or something like that.

Anyway, as it so often does, life threw me a weird curveball last week. Jessica (my fiancee) and I were headed to a bar in downtown Nashville where we play trivia with a group of friends every week. (Yes, pastors go to bars sometimes. Deal with it.) As so often happens, a homeless man approached us as we were walking from our car across the street, asking for money. If we have cash we usually give something to them, figuring it's between them and God what they do with it. The only thing God will hold us accountable for is whether we helped someone in need.

It became clear to us very quickly that this man was mentally ill, as an overwhelming majority of homeless people are, and that he had not had his medication in a while. We learned that his name was Anthony, and he started telling us about himself, showing us his ID, pictures of relatives, and the pocket New Testament he always carries with himself.

Then all of a sudden Anthony asks us to pray for him right then, and he grabbed both our hands and knelt in the parking lot. We followed suit, and I could feel the weird looks of bar patrons walking to their cars seeing a reasonably well dressed man and woman on their knees in the parking lot praying with a homeless black man. I never mentioned what I do or anything, he said he just seemed to sense it.

I'm not really sure what this means. On the one hand I hate that I felt a little embarrassed kneeling on the ground with Anthony. Was I embarrassed to be with a homeless man, or the fact that I was quite obviously praying in public? I'm not sure. I guess it's just proof that, while I preach to people every Sunday about not being ashamed of the gospel, I'm still human just like everyone else.

On the other hand I feel grateful to have opportunities like this. I don't go seeking them out. I don't even consciously think all the time about how I can witness publicly. But as big as my ego can get, its probably better that things like this just fall in my lap, otherwise I would probably get way too proud of myself for doing something God gave me the ability to do.

While most of the time we have to look for God in the common stuff of everyday life, every now and then something unusual comes along just to keep us on our toes. I don't have meaningful encounters with homeless people every day, so experiences like this one serve to remind me that someone in need is always around the corner. I don't know if Anthony and I will ever cross paths again, but for one moment we were able to be a blessing to one another in the simplest of ways.

I guess I'll always have a sign on my forehead, whether I like it or not. And as a Christian, so do you. Let's wear these signs proudly, because you never know who may need a helping hand.

Truth with a capital "T"?

The other night I attended a lecture by a prominent scholar of religious phenomonology. He talked about understanding religious participation and people's level of commitment to it in market terms. When there is one official religion of the state/culture/whatever participation is low because that religious practice is a given, and the leaders of the practice (preists, whoever) don't have to work to keep it going. However, when there is a plurality of religions in a society, participation and commitment is high because people have more choice and the leaders of the various religious traditions have to work to keep their institution going.

The application for today, of course, is that many mega-churches get lots of people by offering things that are attractive, but not necessarily religious in nature. The big church's youth group goes on cooler trips and has a coffee house in their basement, for example.

During the question time one guy got up and asked if it's possible that growing churches weren't experiencing success because they offered the most perks, but because they offered the most Truth. There was a very audible snicker from the liberal intelligensia in the crowd, as if to say, "Silly little man, he still thinks there's such a thing as Truth!"

While I didn't think that he asked the most well informed question in the world, neither did I agree with those that laughed at him. Those that have completed advanced degrees in humanities disciplies (myself included) are well read in Derrida and other postmodern writers who deconstruct modern notions of absolute Truth and pure objectivity in a very compelling way.

The temptation is to say that there are no absolutes and that everyone constructs their own relative truth for themselves. The problem is, that's a statement that implies an absolute. Absolute relativism is kind of an oxymoron.

The issue is not really the behavior of a group of intellectual snobs, even though I am often accused of being one. The issue is that in an age when we are coming to realize that our social and cultural context puts its own particular spin on how we interpret everything, and the extreme limitations of our language to express things, how can we still talk about Truth in absolute terms? Is there any common groud on which a religious community can stand?

I think so. But it's admittedly harder than I'd like it to be. The short version is, I do believe there is one absolute Truth in the universe: God.

God is the absolute Truth. My ability to understand God is not absolute, though.

All other truths we proclaim are valid and true if they point to the reality of the God who is the ultimate ground of our being, but at the same time is present with us in all times and places, and who is constantly calling creation to be all that God created it to be.

That's a mouthful, I know. And even my flushing out of that long sentence is a series of truth claims, which I believe point to the larger Truth of God. I can only pray that I'm on the right track, and that some day I'll actually be wise enough to really get what it means.

What is worship?

... is the big question that's bouncing around in my mind right now. Obviously I'm not going to hit it all here. For now let's make the working definition of worship "a transformative encounter with the living God". If this is the case then why do we call our weekly church gatherings a "Worship Service"?

First of all, what does the term "service" mean these days? A service is something you purchase. Hopefully when one is a member of a faith community they do more than just consume services that the church dispenses.

Second, can we really say with integrity that God is going to do something at 11am every Sunday in a particular place? God's not quite that predictable.

Perhaps when we come to church every Sunday (or Saturday, or whenever) we should engage in the activities that comprise a worship service in the hope that worship, the transformative encounter, will happen. I've sat through and led more worship services than I can count where I haven't worshiped one bit. Hopefully others were able to, but I was just putting on a program.

I can only pray that in the programs I put on, something about it will help people connect with God, and that worship will truly happen.

Countdown to The Gathering

Well, The Gathering is only a few weeks away. I'm simultaniously excited and insanely nervous. It's like of like the feeling I had when I asked Jessica to marry me, only I don't know the outcome of this venture. We're having a "tech rehersal" next Saturday, where we'll see how this whole set-up in the fellowship hall will work. Then we have a full "dress rehersal" the following Sunday, and we officially launch March 5. Honestly, it's probably a good thing that I'm scared out of my mind because it will keep me depending on God for guidance, instead of my usual "big-head" routine where I think I know all the answers.

Oh, you can check out our site:www.thegatheringsite.net. Any constructive feedback is appreciated, and I'd especially love it if you wanted to join us for worship.