The Big Fight (Be A Blessing)

Let the fight begin. In fact, it started a while ago. Every twelve months or so these two superstars face off for the match of the season, waiting to see if this is the year that one of them will finally go down for the count. At least, so many of us act like we expect a fight like that, taking a side and rooting them on from the stands. Merry Christmas, not Happy Holidays! PUNCH! Don't give in to the commercialism! BLOCK! Today's culture has ruined the true spirit of Christmas! JAB! Don't waste your money on gifts when kids are dying all over the world! GUILT! Traffic and egg nog and mall Santas and peppermint mochas make baby Jesus cry! TAKE THAT! And so on and so forth.

Some of my best memories with my family are of us trudging through a foot of snow, being stuck in traffic jams, hunting through malls for some perfect gift for Dad or for a cousin or someone at church. I think that maybe we react too much, sometimes, as Christians. We cheer on a fight where none is needed. And where it would be so much better, so much more Christian, so much more Christmas-y you might say, to act in peace and gentleness.

Love and peace are good, consumerism is bad, yes we all know. But maybe we’re better off working within our traditions and embracing them, rather than so often fighting against them. Go ahead and go to the mall this weekend and look for a nice gift for your mom. And then go home and send a nice check to a charity. And then go help your neighbor shovel his snow while you talk about the latest toys and XBox games that his kids want for Christmas. Be a blessing.

That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

After all, if you did believe in Santa, it was your parents who probably told you about him. There were stories about his home in the North Pole, his elves, his wife, his reindeer, and all of the gifts he brought every year to good kids. Part of it was motivation for you to be good all year, but part of it was the excitement of something magical that you believed in, that didn't seem like it could really happen but you believed it did. Maybe you even heard Santa some nights, or caught a glimpse of him shooting back up your chimney. There were presents under your tree in the morning that were most certainly not there when you went to bed, and many of them said "From: Santa" on the gift tags. You or one of your friends may have fully and completely believed that you saw him land on one of your neighbor's roofs one Christmas night. Some of your friends at school laughed at you for believing in stupid Santa, who was obviously not real. "Your parents put those gifts under the tree--it's a perfectly logical explanation," they might have said. But they didn't understand.

And it occurred to me, how much different are Santa and Jesus, in that respect? If you go back through that last paragraph and replace 'Santa' with 'Jesus', and then change a few of the story details to reflect Jesus' life rather than Santa's, I think you end up with an accurate representation of a lot of our experience with belief in Jesus and God. And maybe, in a similar way, those very traditions that we're so worried will overtake and destroy Christmas have a lot more to do with Jesus than we remember?

To See It For Themselves

I've heard a lot of people say something like, "When it comes to a church movement, I'm uncomfortable when a church won't clearly explain its positions." Even in the poll we did here last week, people expressed a desire for strong, clear doctrine from the church. But I think the edges of the church are beginning to move away from this kind of detailed, inflexible doctrinal statement. In its place are the kinds of statements that vaguely point to the spirit of what the community believes. Many see this as a weakness, but it resonates with my experience with God and doctrine.

For instance, if I saw God's face (and somehow didn't die), and I came back and tried to explain the experience to you, I might find myself having trouble finding the words to say. I might start out by saying, "He looked like... a mixture of Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman -- stunningly gorgeous and yet incomparably wise. And with a Santa-like twinkle in his eye." And yet, this wouldn't really describe him well at all. So instead I might say, "He had the eyes of a lion." But that wouldn't really be true either. So I might try to describe the attributes of his face, to say his face was kind but fearsome, gentle but terrifying, wonderful but awful.

And you, the listener, might start to make fun of me and my descriptions. "Did you seriously just compare the LORD of all Heaven and Earth to Brad Pitt?" Or for using contradictory terms, or for relating him to both a white man and a black man (he can't be BOTH black and white). The way these explanations contradict would seem irreconcilable.

So at some point, I finally say, "His face was love." And that's it. You might beg for more details, but I begin to realize that the more details I give, the more wrong I start to become, and the more wrong ideas I give people. So instead of details, I give a vague description and then encourage people to seek his face out themselves. To see it for themselves.

When you think about it, every detailed description was true in the way that it highlighted certain features of God, but in all the ways it fell short of describing his wonders, it misled. To see him for yourself is to begin to understand how far beyond our descriptions he really is, and longing to see more of him again and again.

Even Jesus presented his teachings about God, his own father, in parables and mysterious proclamations that urged his listeners to chase after understanding and to ask questions of him and of each other. He could have given clear, simple answers in our language that would have seemed like enough, but he knew that the complexity and greatness of God required paradoxical, profound descriptions that didn't always satisfy our thirst for easy answers.

When I think about it like that, and when I think about all of the divisive fighting that detailed doctrine has caused, I have to wonder why we should settle for these misleading descriptions?

A Semi-Millennial Cycle

Approx 1 A.D. - Jesus is born.
Approx 500 A.D. - The Fall of the Roman Empire.
Approx 1000 A.D. - The Great Schism, separating Eastern Orthodoxy from the Pope and his Roman Catholic Church.
Approx 1500 A.D. - The Great Reformation, separating Roman Catholicism from Luther and his Protestant movement.

Approx 2000 A.D. - ?

...

The time is ripe for something to happen. What will it look like? (Thanks to the EV Blog for tipping me off to this article.)

Church Thoughts

So I finally compiled the results of my little poll. Thanks for responding--I knew I could count on you. Here is a table of the results, with my attempts to classify/categorize what you all said.

I obviously took some liberty with the categorizations, but it seems like people think that a church should be diverse, have strong biblical teaching/doctrine, have good community between church members, and reach out to the larger, surrounding community. A church should avoid being rigid or resistant to change, shouldn't worry so much about being modern or cool, and should be careful about getting in the way of Jesus and his gospel.

Now, before I do any expository commenting on your responses, let me list my own. (I ended up having to reconstruct them finally, since I can't find where I originally wrote them down, but I think I got pretty close to my originals.) Here they are.

The Church Should Be

1) A community of people who are honest about their similarities (loving Jesus, seeking out his truth) AND their differences (which could be almost anything else).
2) A safe place for everyone to meet friends, learn about living, seek truth, experience God, and/or observe others worship him.
3) A source of inspiration that results in people becoming who they were created to be in their life and communities.

The Church Should Avoid

1) A long list of doctrines or beliefs that "membership" requires.
2) Becoming defined by our numbers, by exclusion, by measures of success or failure, or by sin-management and reactionary preaching.
3) Lost focus (the church is not a political action committee, or the town judge/detective/accuser, or a private club, or etc.)


Now, let me compare. I'll start with diversity. It looks like I don't find this important at all, but I don't think that's exactly true. I do think that a Church should be representative of the community of people that it's a part of, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea of actively seeking this out. I don't ever want to look at my church and think, "This church needs more Latinos! How can we attract Latinos? Hmm..." Instead, I think I see the problem the other way around -- if a church is located in a Latino community and still has very few Latinos, the question to ask is probably "Are we doing anything that is discouraging Latinos from feeling comfortable or safe here?" If the church isn't a safe place for everyone to seek truth and experience God, why not?

Biblical teaching and doctrine is important, but sometimes I think it becomes a tool for the wrong purposes. The problem, I think, is with our understanding of what counts as "Biblical". There have been many times that I know I have pretended to agree with someone for the sake of what I thought was church unity or solidarity, but what did I gain by doing it? I want the Bible to be preached from because it is dripping with the very truth that we're all there to seek. But the minute our definition of "Biblical" is used to stomp on someone's questions or doubts or confusions or experiences -- the elements of an honest search for a wild and mysterious God -- I think it compromises the strength and the safety that the church has. I want the community of people I worship and seek with to be honest about our differences, and to be okay with them. I don't think we need an inflexible list of mandatory doctrinal statements and theological beliefs to hold our community together, either. Is it possible to be honest about the fact that we're all seeking, and we don't have everything figured out? I think it is.

Community within the church is what the Church is, in my opinion. A group of people who are bonded by the fact that we're all very interested in this God that we've heard about, and are seeking after him together as much as our hearts allow. And out of that search, and out of those experiences with each other and with God inevitably will flow an outpouring of compassion and love for our surrounding communities. But when I think of my desire to love people more, I can't help but think that it's a desire not to be a better church-goer or a better Christian, but just to be human! We believe that God created us to love and care for each other, but we aren't always motivated to be those people that God created us to be. I long for the Church to be a source of that inspiration, serving as the flint that sparks us to love each other, to create beautiful music and art, to care for our communities, and to live in (or out) God's love.

An unwillingness to change can be harmful. Where change is needed, I think the Church should be bold enough to consider it and to follow through with where God leads, as best as can be determined. But I also know that there are times when change feels exciting, or looks attractive, but resisting that particular change is the right thing to do. God help us if we ever begin to believe that all change is good, or that change just for its own sake is always helpful. How to determine which changes are good and right and which are unnecessary or untimely is probably one of the things I'm most scared of getting wrong. Not because I think the consequences are all that drastic, but because I think it's just so hard to know which is which. I guess sometimes we make the best decision we can and let God's grace cover us when we're wrong.

Losing focus, becoming defined by the wrong things, becoming focused on unimportant issues like being modern or successful, getting in the way of Jesus and his gospel -- these are all very similar ways of saying the same thing, probably. We may differ on what's included in the "wrong things" or the "unimportant issues", or what's "getting in the way", but we all recognize that getting sidetracked or becoming something other than what the Church should be is bad for the Church. Because of this, I think an honest community that's willing to discuss these kinds of issues is probably the healthiest kind of Church.


Thanks again for responding. Feel free to let me know why you disagree with my categorizations, or my lists, or my consensus picks, or my explanations. Thanks for reading!

Work Kills

I am currently pondering the inevitability of my future death. I will post my response to the poll later tonight.

Thanks(giving)

Thanks for responding to my church poll. Over the Thanksgiving break I plan to write my own response with a little commentary on what you all wrote.

In the meantime, have a happy thanksgiving!
(if you're American)


Oops, wrong one.