Popcorn And Priests

I used to love going to movies.  The older and crabbier I get, the more jaded I’ve become about Hollywood’s ability to fascinate me. But every once and a while something comes along that seems like it might be worth seeing, so I do what so many of us do – head into the darkened theater, look around for the best possible seat (legroom is a must, and no chatty neighbors lest things get ugly) park my beverage in the cup-holder and settle in.  Dim the lights, start the show – and please pass the popcorn. I’m ready to set everything else aside for a couple of hours and to be entertained.  Bring it, Spielberg.

The problem is – I recognize the times when I have approached a church service in a similar way.  And it is a problem, because when I allow myself to slip into that mindset (it’s so easy, isn’t it?) I am at odds with what Scripture says my role should be.  In particular, there is an interesting word to describe my role that appears a couple of times in 1 Peter.

Priest.  For evangelical Protestants, this is a term with little weight for us because it applies to two things most of us don’t have a strong personal connection to: the Old Testament sacrificial system and higher-church clergy. But there it is, in the New Testament of all places, and it’s pointing at me.  Priest, it calls me.  Huh. I’d better find some understanding of what this means.

In a broad sense, it can mean what Luther took it to mean – that there is no spiritual hierarchy. If I have embraced the Good News I am just as qualified as anyone else, ordained or not, to proclaim it. In fact I have just as much responsibility to do so. No one can lord any authority over me as a minister of God because I am (in theory at least) every inch the minister they are. It is part of my birthright as a believer, and is a role I am called to fulfill.

But there are other meanings as well.  This brings me back to my local church and how I can apply them in a practical way.

First, priests offer worship.  They don’t watch others do it. They don’t grade others’ behavior in worship. They are there to actively offer worship and engage heart, mind and body in ascribing glory to God.  It is easy for me to forget that when I am preoccupied with wondering who that is sitting in the seventh row, or how ugly the pastor’s tie is (for the record, my pastor does not wear ties), or even my own shortcomings and unworthiness. I am there to offer the sacrifice of worship. It’s what priests do. Other things are meant to be put aside.

Second, priests stand in the gap for others. They minister and intercede. They serve the people of God.  If Scripture labels me as a priest then it seems like I ought to be involved in God’s work in some tangible way that demands my time and energies.

While every church is a little different, it’s fair to say that in most, the 80/20 rule still applies: 80% of the work is being done by 20% of the available people (some now refer to this as the 90/10 rule - even worse).  Where are the rest of our priests?  Robes are not required, so I'm thinking it's not a fashion issue.  What are the rest of our priests doing if they are not actively ministering somehow? Is there a priestly on-deck circle? A cocktail lounge serving sacramental wine?

If I claim to take the Bible seriously then I have to wear one of the names that it gives me – priest. The word may not be part of my tradition, but the concepts of worship and service are – very much so.  I am writing this as a gut-check for my own attitude that so easily slides into passivity and the desire to be ministered-to, even entertained. I have to fight that, and to look for ways to wear that name and act out what it means.  That’s my hope for all of us.

No ring-kissing though, OK?  Please. It’s embarrassing.

Get Back To Where You Once Belonged

Make ready with the handcuffs. Grab the butterfly net.  You should know that I take a size 48 straightjacket but would prefer a 50 (it’s roomier). I am about to suggest something that  A.) will sound like a grand waste of time, B.) is dangerously unorthodox, C.) is frighteningly out of my comfort zone, or  D.) all of the above.

We modern-day believers need to become better acquainted with church history.  All of church history. There. I said it, and I can hear the sirens now.  Those nice men in the white coats will be here momentarily.   

Why do I suggest this?  There are probably several good reasons that I haven’t even thought about, but I want to mention three that are most top-of-mind for me.

One is historical/theological.  We 21^st century evangelicals often operate as if Jesus came, the New Testament was written, the church was born and then, BOOM -  we arrived on the scene (with maybe a nod given to the Reformation and some other cool events and people in between).  It doesn’t help matters that our faith is also laced with a strong note of American we-can-do-it-ourselves individualism.  So, although we may have an awareness of church history, in a practical sense we almost completely ignore some 1500 years of it, at least.  Granted, some of it is not pretty to be sure – even shameful.  But, as is true of our own families, it is where we came from and much is to be learned about who we are, what we believe and why, and where we are headed.  Our roots go far deeper than the birth of the modern evangelical movement and exploring them can be very rewarding experience.

Another is devotional.  Over the centuries reams of valuable insights have been written about Christian spirituality. Ignoring these works (as I did for many years) only impoverishes us. It may come as a shock to some that current writers like Max Lucado, Rick Warren and Donald Miller (good as they are) do not have it all figured out.  In fact it is safe to say that consciously or not, most modern devotional writers draw from their ancient counterparts. There is a wealth of rich spiritual literature available from Tertullian, Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Teresa of Avila and scores of others. Their lives and writings offer experience and wisdom that can speak directly to my growth in Christ today.

Finally there is the communal aspect of this. Examining the history of the Christian church reminds us that we are part of a 2000-year stream of pilgrims who have gone before us.  Since the letter to the Hebrews has been written, that great cloud of witnesses mentioned in chapter 12 has seen a population explosion.  It is powerful to realize how strongly we are connected to them and they to us.

I am part of the evangelical tradition and I love my local church. But every now and then I have to disappear into a “high church” service (Catholic, Episcopal), in large part to join up with those who have gone ahead of me.  I need to step into that stream of history and connect, to offer worship in the very same way they did. To repeat the very words my ancient brothers and sisters repeated. To hear the very same Scripture readings that believers around the world heard on that given Sunday in the church year.  Entering the structure of the historical Christian church strengthens my faith by linking it to the centuries, and linking me to my spiritual ancestors on whose shoulders I stand (as well as my Christian family around the world). It reminds me of my true place before God and in history.

I will probably have more to write about this in future posts, but for now the best way I can sum this up is with section from the liturgy: Therefore with the angels and archangels, and with all the company of heaven we laud and magnify Thy glorious name; ever more praising Thee and saying, Holy holy holy, Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of Thy glory: Glory be to Thee O Lord most high.

All together now.....

What - No Hot Dog?

I have a great childhood memory of my dad taking me to Yankee Stadium to watch Mickey Mantle play. I remember that Mantle hit some towering shots, but I remember so much more – the sights, the sounds, the smells. The hugeness of the stadium.   Even the taste of the ballpark hot dog. Though I cannot recall who we played or who won, as we were leaving I remember saying “Wow – what a great game!”

Over the years, I have heard Christians (including myself) leaving church services or praise and worship gatherings evaluating those events in almost the same way. “What a powerful worship experience!” etc. Or, sometimes the opposite.  

We live in an age dominated by branding and marketing, and so we look for ways for our faith to operate in a consumer culture. Even the Gospel has been packaged and pedaled, boiled down to a few verses (usually of the “turn-or-burn” variety) or some pithy summary.   Yet when Jesus preached the Gospel, he had a lot to say about a lot of things. Salvation, certainly but also prayer, compassion, the nature of the world, how we are to interact with one another and a host of other topics. The fact that God physically entered human history turned everything on its ear, and as a result, these issues and more all became part of the Gospel Jesus preached. It was too far-reaching and radical to be condensed down to a slogan. Yet, we often respond to the inward or outward pressure to simplify, package and brand our message - both to ourselves and to our community and world.

One area where we often see this in action is in the idea that we have to provide people with a “positive worship experience” at our church.  In our consumer culture, we are aware that people will rate a church service like they might rate a concert or a play.  It affected me, or it didn’t.  I got something out of it, or not.  And whether we recognize it or not, the need to please consumers has crept into our thinking and planning to a huge degree.  

When someone approaches worship expecting to be entertained, then they can feel justified in judging the experience. “It was a great service”; “That church really knows how to worship”, etc. Or, “What a stiff, boring service”; “They really don’t understand what true worship is about.” As a result, they feel like can now assess that church’s spirituality. 

I am pretty sure this is not what Jesus had in mind when He said “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth” (Jn. 4:24).  Maybe a particular flavor of worship at a specific local church doesn’t suit me. That’s perfectly natural and legitimate.  But it doesn’t give me the right to judge.

I play on a worship team.  I can fall into this kind of thinking as easily as anyone, and often do. Now and then I can feel some subtle pressure (totally self-inflicted) to make sure our singing time is powerful and Spirit-led – or at least to make sure it looks that way.

The truth is, worship is not an experience I can create for someone else.  I can’t market it.  Nor should I try. In stark contrast to the spectator mindset, the biblical picture of worship has to do with an act that is initiated by God and that we engage in. It is a responsive offering that we make. We give worship. And corporate worship is simply the act of two or more believers coming together to offer glory and honor to almighty God.   It has absolutely nothing to do with soaking in an experience created by someone else for our enjoyment. That is foreign to Scripture and would seem completely backward to most of our brothers and sisters who have gone before us over the past 2000 years or so.

If you are a church leader or teacher, try to keep a biblical definition of worship in front of your people.  Worship is not to be evaluated or absorbed. It is to be given.  Each of us is to offer it to God freely from our heart, without reservation.  And God who sees our heart will meet us there.

And, if you attend a church but are not “getting anything” out of your church’s worship experience, here’s an idea – try worshipping.

What Is Needed And What Is Not

It’s official. My career as an ice dancer is over.

My doctor and I mutually came to this conclusion after I shredded my quad tendons during a fall on some ice.  One surgery and dozens of Percocet later (I had a Jerry Garcia Pez dispenser made for the occasion), I am a little surprised about my own reaction to the situation.  In a word, it’s “eh.”

Alright, it goes deeper than that. I really do hate this, and it hurt. A lot. But after the upper and lower portions of my leg were reconnected, my own little diversion into pain and discomfort actually made me more aware than ever of issues that many around me are going through right now – irreplacable loss, serious disease, and tragedies of many different kinds.  Things my predicament doesn’t come close to touching.  And when people are going through these horrible, painful life-changing situations, questions are often asked about the supposed goodness of God and the reality of His love.

This gets into a question that greater minds have grappled with for centuries, and which I won’t even attempt to answer here.  It gets asked in a variety of ways but can be summed up like this:  if God is love, why did He allow this?  Most answers I have heard are completely unsatisfactory because they  tend to be overly simplistic.  They spring more out of a desire to defend God as we understand Him than from any genuine wrestling with the question.

But here is one take-away:  God doesn’t need your defense or mine. He hasn’t put us here to offer an apologia.  Because God understands deep, heartfelt suffering from personal experience in the death of His Son, and because He is in fact all-loving, He allows us our questions.  He is OK with being screamed-at when we need to vent our pain. He is not going to write anyone off because they cannot come to terms with suffering and an allegedly benevolent God.   He gets it.  And in His way and in His time, He will begin to reveal Himself in ways that can bring comfort, healing  and some sense of purpose, even when that does not erase our pain. We need to let people question and even rail against God as they work through the situation, and to trust Him by proxy for them.

The second thing is we can do is to be "intentionally incarnational" – to simply be there without having to provide magic words (which do not exist anyway). We can stare at the floor with them, sharing the silence, the confusion, the pain, the questions and just be present.  Show up. Hug. Commiserate. Ask what they need - and then fulfill it to whatever degree you can.  Promise to pray. Then, actually pray.

Our faith does not give us all the answers. We won’t have those on this side of eternity. But if you are willing to give someone who is hurting the gift of your presence (and it is a gift) and be prepared to offer your comfort and support,  that will go a lot farther and be remembered a lot longer than any words you might have had to say.

We can best be used by the Holy Spirit when we are not trying to be the Holy Spirit. Be who God made you to be.

Equipped But Not Burdened

Parents worry. It’s what we do.  Ask one of us, if you can break through that quietly-panicking glassy-eyed look we have  from time to time. We dream that our kids will be doctors and then worry they will end up on Dr. Phil.  We envision them with large happy families, and the next minute worry that the leaders of those families will have names like Great Exalted Poohbah and live in an abandoned ammo dump outside of Bismark.

OK, so I am projecting. But now and again we do worry about what sort of a world we are sending our teens into and how equipped they are to handle it. We want them to have a faith that is built to last, one that can go the distance. A vital faith they embrace and carry forward into adulthood, passing it on to the next generation.  And our churches hopefully are coming along side us and addressing the same concern.

Is the faith we have built into our children relevant to the world and culture they are about to live in full-time?   To answer that question, we need to open it up and look into the contents of that faith. What is it about?

The fact is (Dad, Mom, church leaders and fellow church-goers), to a large degree, that faith is what we have told them it is. They have been trusting us to teach the truth, after all.

While we could always improve, I think that evangelical churches do a pretty good job passing on the essential elements of the historic faith. You know  -  the biggies, the “creed-worthy” stuff:  the nature of God in the three persons of the Trinity, the sinful plight of mankind, the necessity of salvation through Christ alone, the resurrection, the Second Coming  etc.  However, in many churches, other ideas are assigned nearly the same weight – perhaps not formally in the statement of faith, but they are so much a part of the church’s culture that they might as well be.  Among these are:
- an approach to Christian living that is based more on rules than on the guidance of the indwelling Holy Spirit and the principles of the Word.
- an outmoded and questionable view of women and their roles in church and in society.
- a heavy emphasis on creationism as the only acceptable  view of our origins and a suspicion of science in general. 
-insistence on alliance with a particular political party as the only valid choice for believers.

You could probably add a few more. I am not here to open debates on any of these positions.  As Paul says, let everyone be fully persuaded in their own mind.  My point is this: we do ourselves and our teens in particular a huge disservice whenever we give these or any tangential issues the same or similar weight we give to creed-worthy beliefs.  In doing so, we weigh their faith down with elements that teens may increasingly view as out-of-step as they move into adulthood. If they bundle all of this as "Christianity", and if we have not taught them to distinguish a secondary issue from a core issue (say, one’s political allegiance  vs. one’s position on salvation through Christ), they will be at risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, putting their faith aside because they no longer see it as being applicable in their lives and their culture.

Think I am pushing the panic button here?  This is exactly what is happening.  David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Research Group, cites various reasons why young adults 18-29 leave the church or at best keep it at arm’s length once they are out of the house. Some reasons young adults cited are:  the church is anti-intellectual or anti-science; it over-simplifies complex things; Christians demonize any views that are outside of the church; church teachings do not connect with the real world in which I live; I am not encouraged to think for myself , etc. (for more, read Kinnaman’s excellent book You Lost Me).

At its core, the gospel of Jesus Christ is a challenging message but one that has survived the test of time. So why would we insist on attaching other elements to it that are at best non-essential, making it much harder for teens to connect their faith to their world? (I have some ideas, but that’s for another blog, another time.)

This is not to say that we as believers cannot have our opinions on these side-issues. We certainly can and we should. But let ‘s do a better job differentiating between the historic affirmations of our faith and issues where Christians have agreed to disagree. Let’s be more committed to training our teens in how to examine secondary matters for themselves and come to their own conclusions.  Let’s send them into adulthood armed with the faith, without asking them to carry our baggage as well.

See-saw Part 2

I received some nice comments on the previous post (see below), and a few people suggested that I follow it up with a short list of user-friendly resources for serious study. One person smirkingly suggested that since “balance” was the theme of the last post, I should include a list like this if I truly wanted to maintain balance. He clearly thought he was being funny. OK, Chuckles. Haha. Resisting the urge to administer a head-butt, I did the polite thing and thanked him. Then, I had him blocked.

With him out of the way, this leaves us free to talk candidly. Here then are a few suggestions of items that would be essential in your library.

Start by making sure you have a good translation that attempts to be true to the original languages. Paraphrases such as The Message are great, but are best for devotional reading as opposed to in-depth study. Get hold of a translation that is fairly literal or what is called “thought-for-thought". The New International Version (NIV) is probably still the industry standard here, but there are other good translations such as the New American Standard Bible (NASB), Contemporary English Version (CEV), English Standard Version (ESV) or the New English Translation (NET Bible) that do an admirable job of faithfully translating the Hebrew and Greek.

Several of these come in “study Bible” versions, with helpful notes at the bottom of the pages. These go a long way in providing background and context, and in explaining some of the less-obvious features of the Biblical text. They also typically come with maps, cross-references and other helps that will save you from having to buy atlases and the like. The NIV Study Bible and ESV Study Bible are fine examples. It is important to remember though that with study Bibles, divine inspiration is in the Biblical text only. The notes are simply the research and thoughts of scholars and exegetes.

A concordance (the "exhaustive" kind) lists every occurrence of every word in the Bible. You may want to look up a verse but only half-remember it. Or maybe you want to do a Bible study on, say, “salvation”. Or “fatted calf” (OK, whatever. Who am I to judge?). By searching a key word in a concordance, you can find everywhere it occurs in all of Scripture, and find the verse(s) you want. For years, Strong’s Concordance was THE book to have, but it was based on the King James Version. Arguably the best modern-day concordance is the The Strongest NIV Exhaustive Concordance which is obviously based on the NIV.

A Bible dictionary that defines terms and concepts you may not be familiar with is a great thing to have. There are several out there. One of the best is the New Bible Dictionary.

Commentaries on individual books of the Bible are great, but that can run into some serious moolah (66 books of the Bible, $20-50 bucks per commentary. Do the math). A solid one-volume commentary is a wonderful tool to have on hand. The New Bible Commentary is one of the better ones. But if you are studying a book and want something more detailed, seek out the Old Testament Commentary Survey (by Tremper Longman) or the New Testament Commentary Survey (by D.A. Carson) for recommendations on individual commentaries. The same principle applies – these commentaries are not divinely inspired texts but represent our better efforts to understand them.

Finally….there are many good online versions of these resources you can access with a Google search. And the folks at Christian Book Distributors (www.cbd.com, and 1-800-247-4784) have specialists in these areas who can lead you to the right tools for you.

Please get to me if you have any questions.  Happy studying!

A Lesson From The See-Saw

Growing up, I was always big for my age. You didn’t want to play see-saw with me unless you had a highly-developed spirit of adventure. Or a death-wish. Because I tended to dwarf my friends, the weight balance was always out-of-whack, and there was a strong likelihood that my latest see-saw partner/victim would be vaulted into the stratosphere. On our playground, helmets and padding were standard equipment.

Balance, we are told, is the Secret Of Life (apologies to James Taylor). One area where balance is important is in how we approach Scripture. It’s vital to read it devotionally for spiritual nourishment but also for serious study. Both are necessary because, as the saying goes, you can’t ask “What does this mean for me?” until you have a sense of “What did it mean for the original readers/hearers?” Put another way, a passage may have multiple applications, but its fundamental sense can’t violate what the writer intended to say to his immediate audience. Our devotional reading needs to be informed and undergirded by this knowledge.

How can we know what the writers intended? Through thoughtful roll-up-the-sleeves study. Yet we find a disturbing attitude in many churches, which says that in-depth Bible study is only for the specialists - pastors and teachers, who will then dole it out on Sunday mornings or in small group meetings. There are many dangers to this, not the least of which is not knowing if our leaders are feeding us truth or Cheez Whiz. There is a lot of Elmer Fudd theology out there. We need to know the difference for ourselves.

The great news is that we don't have to be trained Biblical scholars to get deeply into the Word. There is a wealth of solid, user-friendly Bible study helps of all sorts in hard copy and on the web. Few of us can legitimately say that we lack access to the tools. If anything is lacking, it’s the commitment to just dive in and do the work. Yet as many will tell you, once we begin, the rewards come quickly. On top of that, we find ourselves getting jazzed! Soon we can’t get enough. We get psyyyyyyched! Sleep becomes optional. Unsightly drooling may occur (see your doctor). Someone once said to me, “I had no idea I could get this excited about Bible study…BIBLE STUDY!”.

I’ll be the first to confess that I don’t always maintain the balance well. Study involves some work, while devotional reading is comparatively easy. But I’m trying. I want Scripture to inform my heart and my mind, with one voice.