Suffering Gives. It Doesn't Take

I've been meditating on James 1:

Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. (James 1:2-4 NIV84)

I've realized that we all think that suffering means we're going to lose something, maybe even something great. And yet when I look at God's promise in the verse, it says that we will not lack anything. I'm realizing that God has promised that suffering isn't a loss, like we fear. Instead it is our Father's way to get us what we really want. Of course, when I see "not lacking anything," I think wealth, comfort, and desire. I think about stuff. God is wanting something entirely different for us. His desire is hidden in "mature and complete." He really doesn't care about our stuff. He cares about our inner growth so much that he is committed to our suffering.

Honestly, I don't like that. I like my stuff. I don't see the point of suffering, and I don't have the same value on my character that my Father does. But slowly I'm starting to see that although the storms in our lives do blow away our stuff, they also unearth jewels that we'd never have without suffering.

Church vs. State

I used to think America should be a Christian nation. I don't anymore. The fundamentalism I was raised in had melded the two. In Vacation Bible School, we pledged allegiance every summer to the American flag, the Christian flag, and the Bible. Looking back, that's a little scary. 

I realize now the Christian church and the United States are completely different and should be. I value deeply a country where all faiths are free and where the Supreme Court has consistently sniffed out attempts to Christianize American government. Should prayer be in public school? Absolutely not, especially since that question always means, "Shouldn't Christian prayer be allowed?" I don't remember a single case where Jews or Muslims wanted their prayers recited over the loudspeaker before a football game.

I've had this sense for awhile what the church is not. The church is not the state, not even America and its beautiful religious liberties. But what is the church? I don't think I've wrestled well with that question yet, but  I need to for the work I'm doing in education. 

One of my sons passed along a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxes. I didn't realize until I started it that Bonhoeffer wrestled with, "What is the church?" his whole life. He eventually gave his life to the Nazis as he fought for the answer he landed on. In defining the church's role with the state, he had to think through the actions of the church against, not melded to, government. 

The church has three possible ways it can act against the state. First, it can ask the state if its actions are legitimate. Second, it can aid the victims of the state action. The church has the unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering society even if they do not belong to the Christian society. The third possibility is not just [to] bandage the victims under the wheel, but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself. 

I recognize clearly that America is not Nazi Germany, and I'm still mulling the implications of the church jamming a rod into the spokes of the state's wheels to disable it. More importantly, I recognize how Bonhoeffer's view of the church lines up well with that in the Bible. The Christian church is weakened every time it allies itself with the state. America will be a stronger nation when the church questions its action as often as necessary.

I believe in a free state. I belief in a pure church. May we never be a Christian nation.   

Christmas Reflections 2011

I was surprised by Advent this year. It came late, my realization this year that Christ has truly come. I was driving by myself to the Christmas Eve service at our church. I wasn't even looking for Advent by then. It had been a hard December, and I had already let go this year the desire for Christmas to come to my heart. It just wasn't going to happen for me in 2011, especially since it was December 24th, and I felt nothing.

And then, without any effort on my part, Emmanuel showed me that he was with me still in the muck and dirt of the stable of my life. And it happened through the very unlikely Little Drummer Boy.

Until now, that's been one of a few Christmas songs that I think the border on just dumb. Do You Hear What I Hear is another. Neither song gets the facts right about the Christmas story. King Herod was a mighty king, but he definitely didn't tell the people to "pray for peace everywhere". There wasn't a drummer at the manager, and after all, drumming isn't a good lullaby for a newborn. Those songs aren't on my Christmas playlist, and when they come on the radio, I just skip them in my mind.

Erin McCarley's recording of Little Drummer Boy had caught my attention this year, though. (You can hear it here at Reverb Nation. I had run across randomly: I downloaded Tenn Out of Tenn's christmas album, which had showed up on Swackett, a new weather app my son had showed me.) I think I was listening to the song mostly because it was recorded by a woman. I liked the twist that a woman was the drummer boy. I also liked the quiet, slow arrangement. There wasn't any mind-numbing snare drumming thankfully.

When I was driving on Christmas Eve, the line in the song, "and then he smiled at me" really hit me for the first time ever. I've listened to that song for almost 50 years, and I never really thought about how Jesus's smile has made all the difference. I would have missed it again this year except for how Erin's version lingered on "he smiled at me," repeating it three times toward the end of the song. The gentleness of the repetition got my attention, and then my Advent happened. I was expecting nothing from Christmas, and I found myself crying as I drove when I realized how Jesus has smiled at me. He sees me. He loves me. His care for me has made all the difference in my life.

You see, I am the little drummer boy. I'm the guy who would show up at the manager with a drum. I'm the kind of guy who writes books about teaching evolution. That's a definite drum. Drums are all I have; I don't have anything appropriate to bring with me to Jesus. In fact, much that I bring is not even appropriate. My sin and brokenness should startle the Baby Jesus, like snare drum at a crib side. The scary parts of me should make him cry. Mary, Joseph, the Wise Men, and all the other good people at the manger should tell me to take my drum away and leave the Baby in peace.

And then he smiled at me. At my drum. At my brokenness. And his smile becomes the only thing I know. I'm no longer the odd little boy who showed up at the manger with a drum. I am simply lost in the love of that smile. And Christmas has come again.

Prayer-less

I'm not sure exactly what's going on with people at Oak Mountain Prez and Paul Miller's book, A Praying Life, but putting the two together is powerful. Today, I started teaching a Sunday School series based on the book in the Generations class, and many of the us were deeply moved by the lesson. I was caught off guard by the emotions people were feeling, and I had to slow down with what I was focused on and pay attention to what was going on in the room. This is similar to what happened when I taught on prayer this past winter to another class. That was by far the most I had ever seen a class moved by what we were studying.

"For you, what about prayer is hard?"

My guess is that it comes from the deep sense of failure most of us feel about prayer. We know we don't do it well. Our lives are messy and confusing, and slowing down to pray about these things just makes us realize even more how out of control we are. Then, evil comes in and puts us to shame: "You know better...," "You should pray more...", or "God's not really listening...".

I'm thankful that there's hope ahead for this class.

Desiring Prayer

Several people in my class wrote how they struggled with even having the desire to pray. I read those cards this morning, and then asked my class how they would respond with grace and in humility. The image here shows most of their responses, and I thought they had a real beauty to them. As the discussion continued, one man summarized the discussion well with the thoughts in the square in the image. He was hearing how God constantly allows us to lose control in life, which then causes us to surrender in the futility, and then we pray. All we have to do to realize our desire to pray is to simply pay attention to the brokenness in life. 

Messy Prayer

I really do love teaching Sunday School, especially at a grace-centered church at Oak Mountain. Imagine a place where people talk about their struggles and questions as they wrestle to find the truth. Only in a place like that would I admit to having the kind of prayer life shown in this diagram. Yep! That's pretty much my typical prayer time during my devotions. (Click on the image, and I bet it will pop up bigger for you.) Do they make a special ADD medicine for people who only get ADD when they pray? I'm usually a really focused person until I start praying.

This morning, I started the lesson with a brainstorm about how the gospel of grace makes us free. I really enjoyed hearing what people had to say. That's on the left side of the white board picture below. Then we brainstormed the right hand column, taking what we know about how the grace makes us free in general and applying it to how grace frees us up in our prayer lives. I wanted people to be able to see prayer, which Paul Miller calls the last bastion of legalism, in light of gospel freedoms that they were beginning to really know in other parts of their lives.

Dependence and Prayer

Yesterday's Sunday School class was on how the Father molds the circumstances of our life to keep us dependent on him. But, that's not to cripple us. In the context of "a praying life" (not a prayer life, as Paul Miller puts it in his book in Part 1), that dependence is what should cause us to learn to pray continuously, like breathing, throughout the day.

I decided to start the lesson by asking, "How did children come to Jesus?". The responses in purple on the white board were what the class came up with. I then asked, "Why do children ask as they do?". Those are the responses in blue around the outside of the board. Of course, getting our heads around how messily children came to Jesus and how they ask without shame or inhibition was a good way for use to begin to process how we don't usually pray that way. We so often believe that we have to clean ourselves up and get our prayers right. If we can't do that, we stay away from Jesus until we can get ourselves together. All the time, he's saying, "Child, come."

One of my favorite things about teaching at The Oak is the honesty that grace has given us. As we got into the lesson, I guided people to see that the messiness and brokenness of life is what often draws us to pray. When I asked them, "What are the messy places in your life?", I got answers like the ones in black in the center of the board. The first one was "screaming at my children," and the man who said that wasn't trying to be funny. He said his answer with a tone of how wrong he was to talk to his children that way. He lead out with courage and humility in talking about our lives honestly, and the other answers posted in black then flowed. 

And then, I think God's Spirit moved among us to draw us to his Son in our humility and poverty of spirit. We are broken people with messed up lives. We need to pray, not because we're spiritual and disciplined, but because we're desperate. I closed the lesson with the Jesus Prayer from the Orthodox church: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner." That prayer is something I've learned to breath throughout the day in the quiet desperation of my life, and God draws me to himself and comforts me when I come like a child.