Lines everywhere. Any lines to see Jesus?

"Signs and lines" is the phrase I woke up with this morning. They kind of go together; the sign says you should go this way, join the queue, and the sign-makers will do something with you. I wrote about the "signs" part in the previous post here; now for the "lines" part.

The whole book title came to me a few months ago the same way; I woke with this vision of long lines of lookalike people at the doors of churches. They were doing the same thing, the same way, the same place - joylessly. Nothing wrong with routine, but joyless routine? That's what bugs me.

Y'see, there isn't anything joyless about life with Jesus except what people make up.  He's still our king, he's still God, he's still holy and hates our sins...none of which makes life with him a miserable drudge or a fearful cringe. He's all that, but Jesus is also the good brother, the good friend, the good Samaritan, the good God. (Look it up; it's all there in his gospels. Try starting here in John chapter 15.)

So I was thunderstruck yesterday when our friend Eliza sent us a video/song I'd never heard before. Have I been under a rock? I don't think so. It's a simple song about who and what we line up for. That's the line I want to be in. Except...it isn't even a line; he's right in front of each one of us. No waiting. Just one sign, with some really good news on it.

(Where's the line to see Jesus? by Becky Kelley)

(www.wheresthelinetoseejesus.com)

Christmas time was approaching

Snow was starting to fall

Shoppers choosing their presents

People filling the mall

Children waiting for Santa

With excitement and glee

A little boy tugged my sweater

Looked up and asked me

Where's the line to see Jesus?

Is He here at the store?

If Christmas time is His birthday

Why don't we see Him more?

As I stood in amazement

At this message profound

I looked down to thank him

He was no where around

The little boy at the mall

Might as well have had wings

As the tears filled my eyes

Thought I heard him sing

Where's the line to see Jesus?

Is He here at the store?

If Christmas time is His birthday

Why don't we see Him more?

Where's the line to see Jesus?

He was born for me

Santa Claus brought me presents

But Christ gave His life for me

In the blink of an eye

At the sound of His trump

We'll all stand in line at His throne

Every knee shall bow down

Every tongue will confess

That Jesus Christ is Lord

(Repeat Chorus)

Where's the line?

Where's the line?

Where's the line for the Lord?

Signs

(excerpted/edited from Between the Lines: Christianity for Misfit Christians)

And the sign said long haired freaky people need not apply...

And the sign said anybody caught trespassing would be shot on sight...

And the sign said everybody welcome, come in, kneel down and pray...

– Signs, Five Man Electrical Band, 1970

"…Messiah also is the head of the assembly, being himself the savior of the body."  – Ephesians 5:23b 

The word translated “church” 77 times in the Bible is the Greek word ekklesia (ek-lay-SEE-ah), which is ek (out) compounded with kaleo (call).  (Remember kaleo; he’ll be back later.)  Agora and paneguris as well as heorte, koinon, thiasos, sunagoge and sunago all mean groups of people.  What’s so special about ekklesia? 

Ekklesia meant a gathering of people.  When the people found their government officials to be crooken or misguided or just misrepresentative, they would literally meet outside the city boundaries to collectively talk things over.  If enough people came out and decided that a change of management was needed, they would return and effect that change.[i]  An ekklesia was what we might call a town hall meeting, but with a lot more bite than our usual Q&A sessions with elected leaders.

We who are Christians are called out from every thing to be part of some thing else.  Really, we are called to be part of some One else, a relationship. We are “called out” from where we are, “called together” to discover and strengthen our new relationships with God and each other, and “called back” (still together) to the world we came from.  “Called” from Ordinary lives to become an Extra-ordinary Body[ii] of Christ.

Who is “we?”  “We” are the ones who show up on a given moment for worship, for lunch, for coffee and bagels, for a sales meeting.  “We” are the subset in any given group, sacred or secular, who are his, lighted by him.  And “our” sign doesn’t really “belong” to us, but it really does say, “everybody welcome, come in, kneel down, and pray...” regardless of hair, trespass or membership.

 

 Signs (cover by Tesla)

---

[i] See A Greek-English Lexicon, by R. Scott, and H.G. Liddell, p. 206; A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, by J. H. Thayer, , p. 196]; Synonyms of the New Testament, by R.C. Trench, 7th ed., pp. 1-2; and A Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, by Oskar Seyffert, , pp. 202-203.  http://www.hisholychurch.net/ekklesia.html

[ii] Romans 12:5, 1 Corinthians 12 (all).

Churches working together? Yep.

The Baptists do stuff together. (Really well, like in disaster relief.) The Catholics, ditto. The Methodists are perhaps famously ecumenical, reaching across all sorts of denominational and organizational lines. How about all the rest? Well...

I asked my friend Jeff, who's lived here for much of his life (and most of the rest in Central America), who was doing cool parachurch things in the Tampa Bay area. He mentioned Somebody Cares Tampa Bay, among others.

"Well, I've seen people try to draw churches together to do stuff my whole life, and generally it doesn't work. But some years ago, this guy Dan Bernard came in from 10 years on the mission field, which gave him a certain amount of street cred. Somehow, he got it to work."

So over lunch, my first question to Dan was, "How'd you do it?"

"Hard work and the Lord's favor."

I believe it.  Someone asked former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker what it was like to have his job. He replied, "Herding cats." (Sidebar:  fun cat herding video.) I've noticed that most things that cross organizational lines resemble herding cats. Especially where those lines include deep religious convictions. But you'll have a better shot at gathering a lot of cats if you plant some catnip. Or in this case, a word from the Lord and the Holy Spirit that moves Christians in all places and all times.

Dan, fresh off the mission field of Nigeria, heard the name "Ehud," from the Hebrew word for "Unity." It was his next assignment.

He started cold-calling pastors in the Clearwater area, finding those who would like to gather and pray together. A few became more, and after a while there were groups in St. Pete and Tampa, and a Unity Covenant, and cooperative work projects, and...you get the idea.

It looks like Dan went looking for common ground, and found it. The common ground tended to be serving others, which Jesus was pretty clear was a big deal. (Actually, the whole Bible is filled with that kind of thing.) God showed the people at SCTB how they could help churches do what they already wanted to do. He showed them opportunities to bring economies of scale to what had formerly been small, separate resource-buying endeavors by individual churches.

He mentioned that smaller churches often partner with others simply because they don't have the extensive resources of big churches.  They're motivated to practice interdependence. That's a good thing - and not just for churches, but for us individually.

God wants all of us, and each of us. How about those doctrinal divisions?  Dan (and I) quote St. Augustine: "In the essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty.  In all, love." Not everyone will agree to joining with other churches, much less various secular organizations.  But as for me...if God is reassembling the pieces of this broken world using some people different from me, well, he's the boss.  And I want to labor in his way and his favor.

Dan sets great store by the idea of "transference," which is the release of newly-empowered people to keep on doing great stuff without additional oversight.  So do I, which was a big part of my previous career in technology transition from lab demonstrations to end-products. More importantly, so did Jesus, not just in commissioning his disciples, but in how he constantly put them in the front lines of ministry.  That's the key to sustainable ministry that can outlive us all.

Sunday I wrote about Shevet Achim, whose inspiration comes from Psalms 133: "How good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity!  It's like the costly anointing oil flowing down Aaron's beard..." Not surprisingly, Dan cites the same verse in his work.

May we seek the essentials, let the nonessentials rest, and experience the good and pleasant shalom of God flowing through our lives together.

Look...and See

I’m re-reading Mike Yaconelli’s book Messy Spirituality. I’ve mentioned Mike before, as the guy who said, “I think the Christians will be known as the people who have time for you: 'Wanna talk?  Sure. How long you got? Long as you need.'" For me, Messy Spirituality was like air to a drowning diver. It was a huge relief to see such simple “heresy” in print. I wasn’t the only person in the world who saw confusion where the preachers claimed order.

If you think “Misfit Christians” sounds a lot like it, well, that’s because his little book articulated a lot of things that were stirring me up about 7 years ago. We were seeing up close the enormous gap between real teens, real people and the attentive little rows in “big church.”  (Among other gaps.)  Those gaps are still stirring me up.  When I get to heaven, I’d like to give Mike a big hug. 

Here’s an excerpt from one segment called “Unpretending”:

Practically, pretending is efficient, uncomplicated and quick. Answering “fine” to the question “How are you doing?” is much easier and quicker than saying, “Not very well, thank you; my back is bothering me, my teenage children are disappointing me, I’m unhappy with my body, my husband never speaks to me, and I’m wondering if Christianity is true.”

Honesty requires a huge investment of time and energy from the person asking the question (who would then wish they had never asked).

Pretending is the grease of modern non-relationships. Pretending perpetuates the illusion of relationships by connecting us on the basis of who we aren’t. People who pretend have pretend relationships. But being real is a synonym for messy spirituality, because when we are real, our messiness is there for everyone to see.

Pretending is the grease of modern non-relationships. Pretending perpetuates the illusion of relationships by connecting us on the basis of who we aren’t.

That is exactly what I was seeing, and am still seeing way, way too often.  We have whole churches based on the shock and awe of an amazing worship program, or aggressive missions, or a gifted preacher.  Of course those things are good.  But they aren’t God himself, and they aren’t each other.  The greatest and second-greatest commandments don’t mention advertising or organization or charismatic leaders.  Love God, love others.  The rest is details.

When we cling to those illusions they bind our future; it’s part of why we so often choose the status quo instead of change. What if we could distinguish the reality from the illusion, the wheat from the chaff? Would we would live different lives? I say, “yes.” We need to See, not just “see.”

But Seeing begins with Looking:  looking attentively, looking with prayer, dwelling on signs of life and finding the discriminators between interactive caring and casual habit. (I could go on about how living things move and dead things don’t, and how that’s like radar...but I digress.) Looking is hard and expensive and uncomfortable first because it’s active, not passive. It’s interrogative, questioning, probing.

But second, Looking is hard because we’re afraid that we really will See, that we will find no relationships at all among the non-relationships, that we will be left alone without even the illusion of relationships for comfort in the cold.

We won’t fill a gap we choose not to See.  But if we choose Sight for the blind (us), and freedom for the captive (us again), then we open our broken hearts to the God who desperately wants to fill them. It’ll take time, but we’ll find the real and bypass the pretend.

I’m still getting the hang of this. Maybe you are, too. Mike never got it all right; as he said only a year before he died, “My life is a mess.” But the same God who created Earth out of chaos is busy creating us out of mess. Like taking a lump of coal and forming it into the diamond he intended us to be all along.

And by the way (not really “by the way” actually), isn’t it just as amazing to watch a craftsman at work as to see the end product?  (Think Dirty Jobs, New Yankee Workshop, How It’s Made, etc.)

Diamonds

(excerpted/edited from Between the Lines: Christianity for Misfit Christians)

“Children of God...seen as lights in the world, holding up the word of life.”

– Philippians 2:15b-16a

Photo: Iona Drutu. Used by permission.

What does a human made in the image of God look like?  What was his original plan?  Well, for starters, since Jesus says he’s light (1 John 1:5), perhaps we each look like a light as well.  Or maybe, a diamond. 

A diamond is made of carbon, the same stuff that is 18% of you…and far and away the dominant solid element in you.  (Almost all the rest is oxygen and hydrogen – gases.  I’ll resist the hot-air conversation for now...)

A diamond has no light of its own, but if you shine a laser into a diamond (red is fine, but green is eye-popping), the room fills with brilliant points of light, like stars in red or green.  The pattern alters with every tiny change in the angle between the laser and the diamond.  The more the diamond is up on display, uncovered by its setting, the better the effect.  Diamonds deeply buried in mere metals don’t shine so well.

The light shines on the diamond’s surfaces and is reflected at different angles, but it also shines into the diamond’s heart and is refracted (bent) into many new directions inside the diamond.  Each new ray of light reflects internally and eventually emerges to become another point in our laser constellation, producing a pattern unique to that diamond that changes when the diamond moves.

If there were white-light lasers, those refracted-prism rays of light would be in all the colors of the rainbow.  All around, all colors, all glorious.

Maybe that’s like what scripture means when it says we will shine like stars or lights in the world (Daniel 12:3, Philippians 2:15).  We have no light except the one that God shines on us, but we reflect and refract that light in a thousand unique directions and colors.  And when we become Christians, it shines on us, through us, and for us, for always.

We have occlusions and stains and crooked angles in us.  Some were put there by others.  Some we put there, and keep there, ourselves.  But unlike the diamond, we have a diamond-Maker who’s at work even still.  He takes away some of the flaws.  Others he uses to enhance the beauty.  But in all, he is working to complete his design.  And he’s never too busy to stop and admire his work.  (Actually, he’s never too busy, at all.)

Scripture talks about this God who places every star in the sky and knows each by name (Psalms 147:4).  The same God shines his light on and through us; he designed and named all of our ways just as he named each star.  Like all of creation, we were made to be beautiful and wonderful.  He intended his people to be even more awe-inspiring than desert skies, unrecognizably crowded with lights.

We’re made of mere carbon, the stuff of pencils and coal mines and diamonds.  The difference between us and a lump of coal is the shaping hand of a Creator, a good God, who ordained beauty in all things from the very beginning, who said it was all good.

New book available; Between the Lines: Chrisitianity for Misfit Christians

At last, after countless edits and rewrites and 3 proof versions, the paperback version of Between the Lines is available!  At the moment, it can only be ordered through CreateSpace, which is a subsidiary of Amazon.com.  The link to their eStore is https://www.createspace.com/3531269.  Price right now (more in a minute) is $9 plus shipping, which runs from $3.61 to $19.18 at this writing.

The book information will propagate into the regular Amazon.com website within a week, and then on into the major book distributor world (Baker & Taylor, and Ingram) in another 6-8 weeks.  That makes it available to Borders, Barnes and Noble and other brick-and-mortar people out there.  (I have no idea why the delay is so long.)

Why am I pouring out all the extraneous detail?  Because that retail price is the one "for the record"  that shows up everywhere, no matter how much the distribution costs are.  The plan is to make it a few dollars cheaper via CreateSpace.  I "think" that can happen in the next day or two.  More later, and other purchase options.

In the meantime, you can always download the pdf from the misfitchristian website for free!

Shevet Achim

Cyndi and I learned of a little ministry a few years ago that is doing great works of reconciliation between Muslim and Israeli people. They are Christians who go find children with heart defects in the Gaza Strip and in Muslim countries like Egypt, Jordan and Iraq.  Then, they bring them to Israel where Jewish doctors and nurses save their lives.  All this, under the Israeli health system, for about $6500/child.

They call themselves Shevet Achim, which is Hebrew for "brothers sitting together," taken from Psalm 133, "Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity...for there the LORD commanded the blessing, even life forevermore." 

We have spent time with them and worked with them in Jerusalem and in our old home in Huntsville.  We've met the tender, skilled Israeli medical people.  As Christians with American passports, they can go nearly anywhere in the Middle East and be welcomed.  (Which you'd never guess from the news, but it's true.) They have been shown great favor by many people in many countries; it seems that we can all set aside our differences for a child who's gasping for breath due to a failing heart.

They work on thin budgets and thick prayer.  They frequently rush dying children to the hospital in the dead of night.  Here's a year-end update from Jonathan Miles, a journalist who used to work in Gaza in the early 90s and found a new calling there.

Peace:  one small heart at a time.

Dear coworkers,
My wife Michelle and our sons Ben and Zak came over to work with us at the Shevet Center in Jerusalem last week, on break from teaching and studying at our home base in Amman, Jordan.  At the end of the work week Thursday evening I kept a promise to take them to Yad Vashem, where we saw for the first time the impressive new Holocaust History Museum which opened in 2005.

The very first display spoke of the contempt which traditional Christianity held for the Jewish people. Its prominent position seemed to say this was the explanation for all the sights that would follow. Only much further along was attention given to the many followers of Jesus who stood by the Jewish people during the Holocaust.  (The director of Yad Vashem's department for the Righteous Among the Nations once said in an interview that the teaching of Jesus was the single strongest motivation for those who risked their lives to rescue Jews). 

The message sent by the museum speaks to me most of all of how wounded the Jewish people still are. And I believe the calling of our generation is not to argue about interpretation of the past, or deny our connection to the traditional church--but to lay out a new direction for the future. 

A second Holocaust threatens the Jews of the Middle East. And I believe the words of Jesus won't just compel us to try to rescue Jews from their enemies; his words are the only hope that some of those enemies can yet be reconciled to God and to their Jewish brothers.  

Love your enemies. Forgive as we've been forgiven. Add to that Paul's teaching that the death and resurrection of the Messiah has torn down the wall of division between Jew and non-Jew, creating one new man and thus making peace.  We have the only message with the power to overcome the ideologically-driven campaign of hatred waged now against the Jews. And in a small way we've been living and proclaiming that message through our work together for 15 years, one child at a time. 

I'm so grateful for the response to our year-end funding drive. Our goal was $42,000 and we received $52,896. We can continue to bear our message with integrity, keeping all of our commitments.  And I believe the new year holds new opportunities for us to be our Father's ambassadors of reconciliation, working from the solid foundation he has laid. 

God bless you and your household in 2011,
Jonathan for the Shevet Achim community in Jerusalem
http://www.shevet.org