The Kingdom of God is Like Fine Wine.

Today I have been reflecting on the kingdom of God. The lectio divina I do at sacredspace.ie, asked to what common element in my life would I compare the kingdom of God. Jesus compares the kingdom to a mustard seed and a pinch of yeast. (Luke 13:18-21)

I think I would compare the kingdom of God to a fine wine. Each drink awakens my taste buds. As I drink fine wine it makes the food around it more alive, tasty, it awakens food to a new day. Good wine makes the community we share more alive, more open, free, and uninhibited. The kingdom of God is like this once we taste of its goodness, we see the goodness of everything else around us. As we drink of the Kingdom our community becomes enlivened. Laughter and joy abound. The kingdom creates new freedoms, it breaks down the wall of fear we build up around ourselves. The kingdom becomes intoxicating.

Funeral: A True Expression of Church

I did another funeral this week.

As a pastor, (really as a human being) funerals are difficult. In writing my homily for this funeral I read about 75 sermons of funerals, especially funerals for people who are not considered "believing." (Why I would read these, I do not know). As I read the sermons I got very frustrated and angry. I feel like pastors were capitalizing on peoples grief. I know that is probably an unfair observation but none the less its what I felt. The process of preparing for the service, like every funeral I have done in the last 15 years, has left me in a state of wander. Below is a list of my curiosities:

• Why would we use the passages of Lazarus's resurrection for a funeral... it is not hopeful at all... Lazarus actually rose from the grave. As far as my experience no funeral I have preached has any one risen. Can we not find a more hopeful possible appropriate passage.
• As pastors, why do we spend our time considering who is in and who is out of God's kingdom. Is not a memorial actually more about the people still walking the planet
• Relationally funerals are odd. The real memorial seems to occur at lunch following.
• What do we as pastors really know about the people whose funerals we officiate. Sometimes we know a lot but most often we know very little.
• Why do we think funerals are a great place to share "the plan of salvation." People are mourning and we chose that as a time to tell them why people are "in or out"?
• Is it not similar to the old "hell house" routine?
• I find it interesting that we so rarely share the reality that Jesus experienced a ton of loss. Loss of his father, loss of cousin, loss of one of his best friends Lazarus, and then his personal experience of death.
• Something profound happens as we choose to grieve together. I think this is one of the truest expressions of the church.

God will Give you Cavities: But only if you eat enough :)

I seek to be especially careful in how I engage children and their relationship with God and the church. I long for children to grow up and become wonderful adults that have fantastic memories about their religious experience. That way when they grow up and walk away from the church, (which I think most of us do at some point) they wont have to struggle through being hurt by a people that are suppose to be the embodiment of love.

Truth is, in my own experience I have been hurt by way more "christian" people than "non-christian."

One of the ways we try to show love to Children in the church office is by our candy bowl. Our preschool kids love the candy bowl. It is the highlight of their day. For the parents, it is evil (little exaggeration). All a parent wants at the end of the day, directly before supper, is to have their child hyped up on sugar! Even as a non-parent I totally get it (Although we still have a candy bowl.)

To help resolve the issue once every few months the candy bowl disappears. One day it's there another day it has miraculously gone. The funny thing I have begun to notice, is that as humans we very rarely look up. These beautiful little children are only 3 feet away from the miraculously disappearing bowl. It is literally on the counter just above there little heads. But, they don't look up. The object they want most is actually within their reach but they cant seem to find it.

As I thought about this today (honestly while standing at the urinal.. TMI!) I thought "Man that will preach."

It's not just children who forget to look up, We all do. I can't tell you how often I will be sitting at my desk and thinking about difficulties others and I are facing then all the sudden like a candy bowl to the side of the head I am reminded, ... "Why am I not talking to God about this?"

God is all around me ready to listen to absorb my concerns, to awaken me to new realities and I forget to look "UP." I forget that the creator, sustainer, and redeemer, is at my side wanting to listen, wanting to be heard, wanting to be present with me. The Creator of all is wanting us to taste and see that he/she IS GOOD.

May we be aware, awakened enough, for God to give us Cavities.

Sin turns us inward.

I was reading a blog this week by Tullian Tchividjian. He makes a few brilliant statements that I have to share. He says that sin turns us inward and the gospels points us outward. Sin is about me... My wants, My will, My happiness. Like a little child, sin causes me to cry out Mine! "Martin Luther picked up this imagery in the Reformation, arguing that sin actually bends or curves us upon ourselves (homo incurvatus in se)"

The Gospel on the other hand points us outward. The gospel draws us to the other. We are designed to be drawn to God and our neighbor.

"Many of us, in other words, think about spirituality exclusively in terms of personal piety, internal devotion, and spiritual formation. We focus almost entirely on ourselves and our private disciplines: praying, reading the Bible, and so on. That, we conclude, is what spirituality is first and foremost…The gospel causes us to look up to Christ and what he did, out to our neighbor and what they need, not in to ourselves and how we’re doing. There’s nothing about the gospel that fixes my eyes on me. Any version of Christianity that encourages you to think mostly about you is detrimental to your faith–whether it’s your failures or your successes; your good works or your bad works; your strengths or your weaknesses; your obedience or your disobedience.”

One of my favorite professors, Jim Keenan say that Sin is the "failure to bother to love." Love is outward it moves us out of ourselves. Love is gospel. To sin then is to fail to live Gospel

Stanley Marrow 2.

The gospel is not a series of don’ts. It is a call to live life, following G-d.. each convert has a unique faith. And each Convert follows G-d uniquely"

Stanley Marrow

I was going through my old notes and found this.... Stanley you will never know how profound your classes were to me. Even more you will never know how profound you as a person were to me.... "Our love remains"....

I’m sitting in my Thessalonians class with another real, authentic person Dr. Stanley Marrow SJ is a 80 something, Iraqi born, Jesuit, profoundly intelligent, professor. He is one of the people in my life, who if he were to ask me to follow him, like Jesus did the apostles, I would say… Absolutely

Stanley never forces his beliefs or his ideas on us. He just speaks and gives all that he is. If we choose to go where he is going, then great; if not, he is fine with that too, because it is part of us that is keeping us from going with him. And unlike most of humanity Stanley Loves people as they are.

He has given me a security that it is ok to just spout one’s beliefs. In actuality by spouting them just don’t try to force people to accept them. If they do, they do. If they don’t, they don’t. It is all Grace.

He has taught me that we have to realize our theology says more about us than it does about G-d. Thus when we talk about G-d don’t force Him (sic) to be who our neo-Platonist ideas are trying to make him to be.

G-d is G-d. Let him(sic) be.

Finished Bittersweet

I really like the way that Niequest writes. That being said bittersweet left me wanting. From the introduction I thought Niequest was going to allow us into her pain to allow us to experience, or at least empathize with the bitter realities of her life. She would open the door a crack and allow the darkness to escape just enough to draw you into the next short story. There were beautiful pieces about friendship and grace. Grace is new math, is a remarkable chapter. She challenged me to examine if the grace I live is similar to the grace I've received. "Grace is smashing the calculator and using all the broken buttons and pieces to make a mosaic....Grace isn't about having a second chance, grace is having so many chances that you could use them through all eternity and ver come up empty." (21) Niequest shares about a miscarriage that you can tell has deeply shaped her and her family and you can feel that her and her husband have traveled some rough roads. But I feel like I was kept at such a distance from her pain that I couldn't feel the bitterness that the book is intending its reader to experience. I felt like I bought a dark chocolate bar but when I ate it someone had switched it with milk chocolate. It was a bit to sweet for me. It left me craving 75% coaco.

That being said you will see my next few posts will be questions that I gleaned from Neiquest's book. She creates some beautiful word pictures.

Bittersweet 2

"The closer you get, the closer you get."

Chapter 2 of Bittersweet by Niequist comes at such an interesting time for me. After a bit of therapy, and self discovery the past few months, my best friend Dino comes into town from Kenya by way of Boston. Dino is not like most friends. He is one of those rare friends that Shauna speaks of in this chapter that become part of your being.

For over 15 years now Dino and I have shared life together. Over the last five with him in Kenya and me in Los Angeles that sharing happens less and less. But here is the part I never can seem to comprehend. Somehow Soulfriends even when they are not with you, they are with you.

Have we changed? Of course we're both older, I'm chubbier, he's thinner but our essences are still the same. Our thoughts on the hot topics are different shades of grey, but when he looks at me he gets me. There are no looks of judgment or shock. We know each other!

Nieguist is right "the closer we get in life, the closer we get". Each time I pulled away from Dino he stepped forward making me more open, and truthfully I for him as well. We have walked though dark moments and thoughts together.

One of the deepest mourning periods of my life was the loss of that weekly night with Dino sharing life, family, beer, pool, solving the worlds problems, communing, living and simply being. I morn those tuesday nights. Yet, the grace in this, is that five years after our nightly meetings ended, things remain the same. I never doubt that in my darkest nights that Dino is present. He is a part of me. His voice (janice's too) even in absence still teaches me. He has become part of me. That is the sweetness of the bittersweet reality that in a few days he will return home with his family as the seek to raise money in Boston, to return to their home in Kenya Africa.

I know the bitterness of loss because I have tasted the sweetness of friendship.

Bittersweet

I have to admit I am not a chocolate lover, that is unless it is very dark chocolate. Milk chocolate is way to sweet for me. Dark chocolate on the other hand encompasses both the bitterness and the simple sweetness that creates a complexity that my palate desires.

I am reading a short book by an author named Shauna Niequist called Bittersweet. The prologue itself is brilliant and challenging.

"bittersweet is the idea that in all things there is both something broken and something beautiful, that there is a sliver of lightness on even the darkest of nights, a shadow of hope in every heartbreak, and that rejoicing is no less rich when it contains a splinter of sadness."

This yen and yang according to Neiquist is the central theme that runs through Christian history and faith is "death and rebirth." While this makes me uncomfortable because I want to avoid lumping Christianity into holding the idea of death as central to its core, truth is I know it is true in my own life. My life has had its darknesses, its deaths. It is in those seasons of death that I hope and long for life to spring forth. Those bitter moments make the sweeter moments of my life mean more.

What would Easter be without Good friday? ...The promise land without the desert? Suffering like it or not is a part of all our existences. There is something important that happens in that dark space...

more of bittersweet to come...

hope and grace

These two words are two of my favorites. Hope because its what keeps me going and Grace because without it I am nothing. To my and Heathers great surprise when we were in Napa there is a winemaker who started his own wine company called Hope and Grace. He named it this because those are the names of his daughters. (which made Heather and I think about naming our child as well)

Not only are those two of my favorite words but the wine was killer. The tasting room has amazing art and over half of it was of a spiritual nature. If you are in Yountville (near Napa) check out this winemaker and his wine. If not just order some online.

http://www.hopeandgracewines.com/