Finding God Where We Least Expect Him

     

   

     The Christmas story, in spite of all of our contemporary church pageantry complete with camels, elephants, full-scale choirs and televised broadcasts, is a story of silent desperation.  A young couple on a cold winter night, with nowhere else to turn.   The Christmas story, if you read it carefully, raises questions, that perhaps we don’t have the answers for.  

     It is a story of preposterous implications that asks us to believe in that which we can not understand. It demands that we remove our shoes of rationalism at the doorway of the miraculous and walk barefoot in recognition that we are standing on Holy Ground.  For who’s to say which is a greater miracle:  angels singing in a field to shepherds, or the power of a life that has been transformed by the presence of God? 

     In today's politically toxic culture, where even the church is divided left from right, I find myself wishing I could be transported back to that night. I wish I could be sitting in that field, trying to keep warm by a lone fire as sheep slept nearby. I wish I could feel the goosebumps on my neck as suddenly the stars are outshone by heavenly beings singing a melody never heard before. 

      I love that the angels sang to shepherds.  Shepherds!  God didn't send this angelic choir into the middle of the synagogue.  He didn't send them into the center of the Roman courts.  God doesn't usually show up where we think He should, the way we think He should.  Neither politics, nor organized religion held the hope for humanity that night. The entire Christmas story is an incredible tale of the divine coming into the middle of the dust, dirt and desperation of our lives.  

     When I think back on my own experiences of a sense of God's presence that is so overpoweringly real, they have become milemarkers for me in the journey of my life - more often than not, those experiences were not in a church.  That's not to say that God's presence is not found in organized worship however, the personal, intimate sense of God wanting to communicate something to me, oftentimes caught me when I wasn't looking for it - like the shepherds, when I was simply doing what I had to do:  in a cafeteria, watching three girls dance to worship music from a $79 boombox, in a kayak in the middle of a remote lake in the hills of Vermont.

   So, perhaps the best way to celebrate Christmas is simply to stop from our politically biased rhetoric and arguments over who has it right. Perhaps it is simply to be silent long enough to listen for God's voice in the most unlikely of places.  We just might be surprised...we just might hear the rustling of angel's wings in a cold, dark field...we just may hear a newborn's cry of life, of hope, in a place deep within our own souls where we had denied him room.

Just A Country Girl

"We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." TS Eliot

I grew up in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains, in a tiny little working class town tucked into the center of the Pioneer Valley.  It was a thirty minute drive to the closest grocery store. There wasn't a single movie theater or mall within 45 minutes. My teachers in school had taught both my parents, who were high school sweethearts and married at 18 and 19.  My dad, like my grandfather, worked his entire career in the paper mill situated by the river in the neighboring town.

I was always mystified when families would move into town from the city and my new neighbors would look at me incredulously and say with great sarcasm, "what do you do out here?" I remember thinking what a ridiculous question that was.  Spring brought the annual canoe races where my cousins, aunts and uncles would sit on the bank behind my grandparents house watching to see who would capsize as the canoes and kayaks navigated the Spring time white water of the Westfield River. Summers were spent riding my bike to the small town library and racing home to curl up under an apple tree and get lost in a great adventure.  Summer evenings there were adventures of our own catching fireflies and running from the boys chasing us with empty mayonnaise jars filled with nightcrawlers. Winters were full of snowmobiling followed by snow eating parties with delicious hot maple syrup poured over a sheet of snow.  On the off weekend that I didn't have dance classes, I'd grab my ice skates and head to an ice covered alcove in a neighbors field, where I would ice skate until it was almost dark and my cheeks were rosy from the cold winter breeze.

It wasn't until I was in high school that I realized that growing up in the country was something to be ashamed of.  Getting elected to the state student council meant monthly trips into Boston where I would meet with students from other cities across the state who all seemed so much more sophisticated than I was.  So I learned to keep my country roots a secret.  By the time I graduated from high school, I couldn't wait to escape from the smallness of my small town and get out into the real world where there were cities waiting for me to discover and a sophisticated, glamorous life waiting for me to live.

I learned to look with disdain at my small town, which seemed to get smaller the more I traveled and discovered the world.  People who knew me post- small town upbringing were always shocked when they discovered I had grown up in the country.  They would laugh and exclaim, "there is no way you grew up in the country!"  I had done a great job of disguising my small town beginnings.

Today, I was returning to the small town my father had grown up in.  It was the church my parents were married in.  Today it was the church my uncle would be memorialized in. As I stepped inside the sanctuary I struggled to reconcile the simplicity and the smallness of the sanctuary with my girlhood memories of this same space, which had seemed so intimidating and cavernous to my six year old eyes.   Today it was neither of those.  Today, it was a small country church, in the center of a small New England town, looking almost exactly the same as it had over 45 years ago.    It remained as it had always been.

  These were country folk. This was a country church.  Hand carved rafters of wood that had been polished to deep umber tones, simple stained glass windows that softened the sunlight, and a pipe organ in the very front and center of the small sanctuary, held a place of honor in the wood encased choir loft.

I crowded into the same wooden pews that I remembered from long ago and sat next to my parents as the memorial service began.  It was a beautiful service. Simple yet sincere stories told by tearful children and grandchildren about a man who had lived and died in this small country town.  They spoke of him as their hero. They cried as they told about the amazing love story he shared with their mother - for 66 years. The tiny sanctuary echoed with the sounds of family and friends struggling to hold back tears for a man who had lived a life of quiet integrity and devotion to family in a very small town. 

The pastor had opened the service by reassuring all of us that he was not going to preach a sermon.  Yet there was a sermon preached that morning that will perhaps be one of the most profound I have ever heard.  It was the message of a life lived by a man who had the wisdom to know and the courage to hold onto that which was truly important.  Faith, family, honesty, integrity.  It was a very large message lived out simply and quietly in a very small town.

As I sat in the carved wooden pew, wiping away tears, I finally embraced the legacy that I had been struggling with most of my life.  Perhaps for the first time, I recognized the profound gift that I had been given.   I quietly slipped my feet out of my designer heels and wiggled my toes.  I prayed a silent prayer.  I was thanking God I was a country girl.

What Do a Coward's Bullet and the Complementarian Ideology Have in Common?

This morning, good decent people around the world are reeling in shock over the cowardly act of a religious and militant extremist member who walked onto a schoolbus and shot a 14 year old little girl in the head, because she dared to speak out for girls rights to education. Many are praying, some are protesting, others simply shaking their heads in sadness and unbelief at the profound barbarism of this act.

As horrific as it is, what makes Malala's attempted assasination so shocking is that this 14 year old was actually on the Taliban's hitlist. She was shot because of what she believed in and dared to speak out about - that girls are entitled to an education and a future of their own choosing without limitations imposed on them by a cruel and misogynistic religious extremist group. Malala wants to become a doctor.

As I found my thoughts and prayers going to this bright and courageous young woman repeatedly throughout the day, I also found myself thinking about something I had just read on-line. It was a position paper featuring the content of the keynote address for the 2012 EFCA Theology Conference, the topic was: "Understanding the Complementarian Position: Considering Implications and Exploring Practices in the Home and the Local Church" The address was given by Don Carson, currently at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Bob Yarbrough, now at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis, before some 265 attendees.

As I went about the busyness of my day, both these events kept coming to my mind, like a pesky mosquito looking for his next meal. I would pray for Malala and then simply dismiss my thoughts on the Complementarian Position paper as I focused on the work I had to get done. It wasn't until much later that evening, when the pesky mosquito linking these two scenarios was still buzzing about, that I finally sat down to try and sort through it. That's when I realized why I was unconsciously linking these two seemingly disparate events together; they shared a great deal in common.

The barbaric coward who shot Malala was created by a religious ideology which teaches that the oppression of women is mandated by God. The literal translation for "Taliban" is "religious students." This Frankenstein was created not in a science fiction laboratory, but in a mosque filled with religious devotees who supposedly want to please God. The history books are filled with atrocities of mindblowing proportions carried out in the name of obeying God. From the religious crusades, to the burning of Joan of Arc, to the Salem Witch Trials (for some reason, women seem to often be the target of religious based cruelty and oppression).

While in the Western World, we are protected from the barbaric atrocities of religious ideologies which would justify the oppression of women by means of physical abuse and torture, we are not protected from religious ideologies which advocate the oppression of women as being mandated by God. In the United States, these heinous ideologies are slickly wrapped in packages designed to conceal their true intent, words like "complementarian", phrases like "equally valued, equally loved" are connected to an ideology which would tell women that God does not allow them to teach or preach or lead under the shadow of the church steeple. Anyone who dares to disagree with this ideology is dismissed as simply not wanting to obey God.
The reasons for justifying this oppressively misogynistic interpretation of Scripture are many, some of them based on an attempt at scholarly exegesis of Scripture and others on blatantly misogynistic and oppressive personal bias. For example, in defending the complementarian position from a sociological perspective, Robert Yarborough had this to say: (Ladies, just a warning, fasten your seatbelts, these are direct quotes from the EFCA position paper)

"To ordain women is ultimately to alienate many if not most unchurched men…To put the matter bluntly: in many marriages, wives try to control or at least change their husbands, and men refuse to be bossed."

"...numerous social indicators in the West point to disastrous results for large numbers of women and children since the 1960s when social mores began an aggressive departure from biblical teaching in areas like sexuality, divorce, and abortion, and as women’s ordination became more acceptable with the rise of feminism. Since that time, in the U.S. at least, rates of female poverty, female imprisonment and recidivism, child neglect or endangerment, sex crimes (particularly against children), internet pornography, and sexually-transmitted diseases have increased dramatically. "

I don't know where to begin. Just the simple fact that this barbaric level of reasoning is being put forth by a seminary professor at a theological conference is mindblowing. Really Professor Yarborough?! "men refuse to be bossed?!"  Are you truly inferring that internet pornography and sex crimes against children and STDs are directly attributable to women being allowed to teach and preach the gospel?! Perhaps, you are not familiar with the well known statistics:

*Men perpetrate the majority of violent acts against women (DeLahunta 1997).

*22 million women in the United States have been raped in their lifetime. 63.84% of women who reported being raped, physically assaulted, and/or stalked since age 18 were victimized by a current or former husband, cohabiting partner, boyfriend, or date. (National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey 2010)

*Somewhere in America a woman is battered, usually by her intimate partner, every 15 seconds. (UN Study On The Status of Women, Year 2000)

*Thirty percent of women watch Internet porn, according to a new study. The number is higher for men - 70 percent - in research conducted at the University of Sydney's Graduate Program in Sexual Health, reports Australia's Courier-Mail.

And as for crimes against children, the sexual trafficking of women and children is now the second largest criminal industry in the world and it is an industry run and financed by men.

But facts aside, Professor Yarborough is teaching and preaching that one of the primary factors for these atrocities is the ordination of women who want to serve God with their gifts of teaching and leading. There is the bullet. Instead of a gun, the weapon (method of delivery) is the EFCA (Evangelical Free Church of America).

While there is no comparison between an ideological debate and the suffering and agony of Malala, fighting for her life in a Pakistani hospital, we kid ourselves if we fail to recognize that the spirit behind both is an extremist belief that God mandates the oppression of women, whether it's a courageous 14 year old Pakistani girl wanting to become a doctor, or a 14 year old American girl who wants to serve others as an ordained member of the clergy.

Finding God In A Kayak

As I stood on the edge of the dirt road leading to the boat rental office, watching the parade of people coming to rent canoes or kayaks, I remember feeling a bit like the ugly duckling.  "You don't belong here."  the voice inside my head shouted.  "Look at these people, they are nature types, berkenstocks, and khaki shorts, water bottles and no make-up; they are the kind of people who kayak, not you."  While I stood off to the side of the dirt road in my white shorts with my designer flip flops from Newport, RI and my knock-off designer sun glasses, drinking a diet pepsi; I had to agree with the voice inside my head:  I didn't belong here.  I was an imposter, posing as a back to nature lover.  However, the man I adored and was married to had been asking me to go kayaking for weeks and so today, I was going to kayak regardless of how painful it would surely prove to be.  So I told the voice inside my head to shut up and went to grab our paddles and life vests.

On the way back to the car, one of my designer flip flops broke.  "See, this is an omen, this is not going to be a good thing." The voice taunted me.  "Shut up!" I replied, as I limped back to the car, with the paddles and vests, dragging one leg so as not to loose the now useless flip flop.  I tried to feign excitement as my husband drove us down miles of dirt roads in Southern Vermont to get to our destination.  We were not going kayaking in any of the typical tourist spots, where there were lots of people and civilization.  No, we were going kayaking on some remote lake up in the mountains of Vermont far out of range of cell phone service and indoor bathrooms. "What if you have an emergency? How will you get help? You could be stranded out here in the wilderness fighting for your life, worse yet, what if you have to go to the bathroom??" the voice in my head shouted. I silently began trying to remember all of the first-aid skills I had learned decades ago in the girl scout classes my mom had forced me to go to.  All I could remember was something about a tourniquet and how ugly the macrame vests were that they forced us to make.

As we carried our kayaks to the edge of the lake, there was a mother and young son peering intently into the water and pointing.  The mother was saying something about how she thought they were salamanders and she didn't like them.  "There's tons of 'em"  the little boy shouted excitedly.  "Run now!" the voice inside my head shouted.  Momentary panic set in as I thought about having to wade barefoot into salamander infested waters. What if I step on them? Do they bite?  I resolutely determined not to look down at the water as I pushed my kayak into the lake and climbed in.

With my husband, and his fishing gear, safely in his kayak behind me, I started paddling out towards the middle of the lake.  I was pretty oblivious to the beauty and grandeur that surrounded me because I was intently experimenting with the best way to paddle in order to get the most speed.  I like to drive fast, even in a kayak.  After about 5 minutes of getting myself soaked with fresh lake water as well as working up a sweat, my husband called out to me:  "Honey, I think you are holding your paddles backwards, turn them around."  I did.  It worked much better that way and I was soon pleased with myself as I set out to break the world's speed record for kayaking. 

As I looked back, I realized I was putting quite a bit of distance between my husband (who was busy baiting his fishing line) and myself.  I pulled my paddle out of the water and looked up.  That was when I lost my breath.  I was surrounded by nothing other than nature, in all its early Summer grandeur.  The robin's egg blue sky, the sun dancing off the water, all framed with varying shades of green, the mountains rising up in the background and the sounds, that was the most breathtaking of all, it was absolutely silent.  No cars buzzing past, no cell phones ringing, or radios blasting, just silence and the occasional melancholy call of the loons who shared this remote spot.

Suddenly, I felt a peace like a giant, hand-made quilt, wrap itself around me.  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath as if to breathe it into my soul.  "Be still and know that I am God." The voice inside my head was suddenly silenced as the word of God spoke deep into my heart.  I leaned into this incredible peace and allowed it to wash over me, to flow through me.  My muscles and mind relaxed and I breathed deeply and easily.  As I lay there in the middle of that remote lake, with the sunlight warming my face, I realized what a stranger to my life this visitor called peace had been.  I knew I needed more of this.

Almost three hours later, my husband and I reluctantly paddled back towards the shore.  Two of the protected loons who lived on the lake, had decided to accompany me.  They paddled almost within reach of my kayak the entire way back as I, of course, talked to them. 

 As we drove home tired and happy, I realized that I no longer felt like the ugly duckling, in a world where I didn't fit in. I had made two new friends on the lake that day: the loons and a welcome visitor called peace. I silently resolved that I would see them both again soon.

Mega-Churches: Time to Roll Up the Red Carpet Approach to Worship?

“People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state--it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle.... Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one's actions."
 (The Wisdom of Heschel,  Abraham Joshua Heschel)

In a culture where church sanctuarys look more like the latest stage set for the Academy Awards, complete with floor to ceiling projection screens,  multi-million dollar sound and theatrical lighting, and multiple television cameras strategically positioned to capture the on-stage talent and leading  personalities, is it any wonder that more and more people are growing disillusioned, disappointed and disenfranchised with our Westernized version of "church?" The mega-church phenomenon, grew out of the soil of a 1980's American culture where materialism and consumerism were the cultural deitiies worshipped by a generation of baby boomers who had not yet lived through an economic crisis.  The American dollar was the global King of the Mountain and everyone was determined to stake their claim.


Under the guise of becoming "seeker-friendly" church culture morphed into a consumer driven, mass-marketed machine with Starbucks coffee shops in the lobby, entertaining infomercials appearing on giant screens in the sanctuary and church worship leaders vying for the next major recording label contract.  While there is much that is wonderful, relevant and worthy of applause in the mega-church model, perhaps the latest statistics on church growth are reason enough to step back and ask ourselves if it may be time to roll up the red carpet approach to worship.


While mega-church culture has much to offer, it unfortunately comes with "side effects" that we need to be aware of.  Like the commercials we are all tired of seeing heralding the latest wonder drug and then ending with an announcer speedtalking their way through an alarming list of side effects that are perhaps worse than the ailment we are looking to treat, so too  mega-church culture has left us with an alarming list of side effects that are unfortunately causing many people to change the channel in their search for genuine spirituality.


In this blog series:  "Finding God In..." we will take a look at the many different and perhaps surprising, places where we come in contact with that presence which overwhelms us and speaks to a place deep within our soul that lets us know there is a presence so much greater than our ability to understand or comprehend, that reassures us of our connection to the eternal, that somehow communicates that we are not alone down here in the "muck and the mire" of our lives and that there is a meaning to our stories, to our suffering, to our triumphs and our tragedies that perhaps transcends our ability to neatly categorize or label.  God's presence extends far beyond the sound-insulated ceilings of our contemporary mega-churches and the spired ceilings of our historic cathedrals.  It will not be contained, yet it beckons us to be found.

Next blog in this series: "Finding God In A Kayak"
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Where have you felt God's presence outside of a church building?

Broom Fight In Bethlehem?

Monks battling it out with brooms at the birthplace of Christ?  Sounds like the opening for a bad joke, but it was actually a headlining story in last weeks news.  Apparently the "Church of the Nativity" built over 1500 years ago, at the site history claims to be the birthplace of Jesus, is maintained by monks and priests from the Catholic, Greek and Armenian churches.  Apparently, the arrangement for this historic landmark is that whatever space you clean, is the space you own. (Not a bad idea for those of us raising teenagers!).  The news story is that a fight of tremendous proportions broke out among the Greek and Armenian monks who began beating each other with the brooms they were using.  Palestinian security forces were called in to settle the dispute.  The irony of the story is that this historic landmark suffers a leaking roof which has been in disrepair for years and as a result has ruined much of the priceless artwork inside the church.  The reason the roof has not been repaired?  The three churches have been fighting over who will pay for it!  (According to the newstory I read, a deal has finally been brokered to address this).

Perhaps what this story illustrates best is what religion void of spirit will ultimately devolve into: broom fights over territorial rights.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer perhaps said it best when he wrote: "Christianity conceals within itself a germ hostile to the church.  It is far too easy for us to base our claims to God on our own Christian religiosity and our church commitment, and in doing so utterly to misunderstand and distort the Christian idea." While the ridiculousness of this story is apparent on many levels, it may hold the key to understanding why so many mainline denominational churches today are being forced to close their doors and turn their historic spaces into condominiums or posh restaurants. 

Churches have forgotten how to feed the soul.  In a culture that is perhaps the most spiritually hungry in centuries, the church is in danger of becoming the last place people will look for a spiritual meal.  The church has allowed political platforms, marketing gimmicks, and territorialism to replace that which originally gave it life: the Spirit of God setting hearts on fire with a revolutionary message of God's kingdom flourishing "on earth as it is in heaven;" a kingdom that transcends denominational boundaries, ethnic/cultural differences, gender bias, and most importantly of all, a kingdom that is not limited by the shortcomings and imperfections of each one of us. When we allow our focus to become territorial and political it is at the expense of that which is truly priceless: the artwork of the church - the spiritual choreography that orders our steps into a thing of beauty which dances hope and inspiration to a hurting humanity.

While it may be easy to throw stones at the men of God involved in this news story, weilding brooms for battles; perhaps we need to search our own hearts and ask where we have perhaps been fighting for territorial rights rather than surrendering to the Spirit.  Perhaps it's time for each of us to allow the Spirit to clean house and to lay down the broomstick battles we have been waging for an open heart of surrender to the Spirit which brings life and healing and which is the only thing able to transform the brokenness of each of us into a thing of beauty, a priceless work of art.

Wrestling With Angels - The Second Act

There are times when life demands that we change - profoundly change. Moments that demand of us the courage to face our failures, our fears, our betrayals. Moments when we can see the vision on the horizon that beckons us with an inner longing to journey forward and yet paralyzes us with a profound dread as we realize that all that has brought us to this place is insufficient to move us into our destiny.

It may be the reality of crossing the threshold from mid-life into our Senior years, it may be the milestone of having to deal with the loss of a spouse or the horror of losing a child, it may be the triumph of having survived cancer, it may be the brutal adjustment of divorce or the hopeful anticipation of re-marriage.   This is not the milestone of the young, filled with the optimistic idealism of youth.  This is the milestone for those of us who have already lived a great deal of our lives, who have a history to look back on and come to grips with, for those of us who have experienced both the triumphs and the tragedies of life and who want to move into the next part of our journey somehow changed and prepared to build a future that transcends the mistakes and shortcomings of our past.

This is the second act.  The place where the stage has been set, the conflict has been revealed and we move forward into the hopeful resolution.  It is a place where we must wrestle with angels in order to see the face of God.  It is the place where, if we refuse to let go; we will leave with a blessing and yet we will walk with a limp, for dust can not look on the face of divinity without being forever marked by it. 

This is perhaps, the most difficult place to be in. That place where we know we must relinquish what has brought us to this point in order to move beyond it into the place that the Spirit is calling us to.  It is these places where, like Jacob, we need to see the face of God, for what is required is more transformation than change.  It is a place where our souls are marked with the fingerprint of the transcendent and we exchange the name our past has given us for the name our future destiny demands.  It is these places where we must face the terrifying beauty of the divine, and refuse to let go until we have received our blessing.  It is these places where our broken humanity wrestles with the angelic. 

If life finds you at one of these places, that Jacob called "Penial" "for I have seen God face to face and my life is preseved," may you be encouraged to refuse to let go until you have received your blessing. May you have the courage to come face to face with the terrifying truth and be set free to move forward into a future filled with promise, grace and magnificent wonder.  May you begin the "Second Act" from a place of transcendent transformation that has wrought beauty from ashes, turned your mourning into dancing and with face to the horizon, may you move forward into your unique destiny.