Wow…I have not posted in a while. This past weekend I took 39 youth to Youth Quake 2006 at Briercrest and it was a blast <wheww!>. It was also tiring. What an event. It appears to be chaotic and yet there is definitly a great deal of order – how else can you house, feed, and generally move around more than 3,000 senior high youth around a campus? It was a great mix of worship, prayer, preaching, teaching, music and fellowship (and almost no sleep). The bus ride (8 hours there, 8 hours back) was also very rewarding in terms of relationship development.

 

Now – on to the topic of this post.

 

As someone who was called to ministry out of a career in software marketing I know what it feels like to be constantly chasing after "the next big thing" in terms of message. Now I have noticed that when it comes to church and ministry pastors are constantly falling into either one extreme or another – very few seem to be able to find a balance. Here’s what I mean:

 

There is a temptation for some to get so worried that people will be bored that they are constantly chasing after the next big fad for their service. At the other end of the spectrum are people who couldn’t give a rip if people are bored. The service, as wonderful as it is, was designed 400 years ago somewhere in Saxony and if it was good enough for our forefathers then by golly its good enough for us.

 

Somewhere in there is a balance. Of course, in all things, if we look to Christ I think we find our answer. In this case I think it is important to recognize that God has given us a certain amount of latitude because scripture is relatively vague in terms of an order of service. One can also see that God was sensitive to cultural relevance in terms of His own actions.

 

Take for example the incarnation, quite frankly this is the ultimate expression of cultural relevance – God says "As part of my eternally known plan to save my people I am going to communicate my truth to them. Now I can appear to them but my holy presence would overwhelm them so I must veil my glory. I can speak to them in dreams, in the law, through prophets and prophetess’s, through burning vegetation, pillars of fire and cloud, angels, etc. Nevertheless they never seem to get it." God’s children that is.

 

How does God choose to communicate with broken humanity? He says the best way for me to do this is to become one of them, to put on flesh, walk with them, eat with them, sleep with them, cry with them, feel pain like them, and die like them. So God condescends to become human (still maintaining His complete "Godness") and live in the stinking, broken filth of a world whose rule has been temporarily given over to His adversary. I don’t know if we can really understand how culturally relevant that act is. That an eternal God took on human flesh…He loved us that much.

 

This act of God should inform our own ministry and service to His people. God could have said –

 

 

This is often what we as members of the body of Christ say in regards to our culture and those whom God would save. Those whom He loves. We say –

 

 

We believe somehow we must maintain God’s transcendance as though He never chose to dwell amongst us in the first place. As Andy Stanley (pastor and writer) has said – we must learn to separate our methodology from our theology – because although they inform one another – they are distinctly different.

 

God’s truth NEVER changes. His Word remains exactly the same today as it was 2,000 years ago. BUT – we change. His Word exists to communicate to us and we change. The way we understand things changes, culture changes, and so the way we present the eternal unchanging truth in Christ MUST change as well. We must be Christ who is the God that did not speak Aramaic in Heaven but did so 2,000 years ago because of the culture He wished to communicate to. He is the God who likely does not drink wine in Heaven but creates it at the wedding because He has a message to communicate.

 

We are the body of Christ continuing His mission of unfolding the Kingdom of God and destroying the Kingdom of Satan. We must continue in the act of being relevant because of our love of humanity which is God’s love. Iin the process we must never compromise the truth in Christ – this is the balance that must be struck, grace without compromise – to be able to say to the person:

 

Ok – last night after Junior Youth ended I was hagning around with about four of the girls who were waiting for parents and they got very creative – I only have two words for you:

 

NOSE DRINKING

 

Yes – they decided they wanted to see who could drink the most water through their noses in the shortest amount of time (one straw per nostril) – it was a sight to behold.

In my experience writer’s get rejected on a fairly regular basis (or maybe its just me   ). I don’t make it a habit of publishing my rejection e-mails but I liked the way Lark News (a Christian satire e-zine) rejected a piece I had submitted satirizing Philip Yancey (I am a huge PY fan BTW – see WAAAAYY down in Blog somewhere..):

 

My ragged muse
has been beaten

and thrown across the room

 

my ragged muse

retreats to the

dark side of the moon

 

and sometimes…

 

when the beautiful music plays

my ragged muse dances

from her sad corner

 

and the world sings

                               and beauty rings

 

and she’s the Angel she was meant to be

naked without shame

pulling tears from Heaven

Tearing cries from me

 

"forgive and love relentlessly!"

 

NOTE: All credit to James Blunt and his song "Your Beautiful" for this poem. My muse needs music and this song drew her from her lonely hiding place and she danced brilliantly for a few minutes. (I’m an old softy)

 

Siren songs

swim through the air

 

lulling,

           longing

 

misplaced angel

crying to Heaven

 

soul-seeking love

alone and watching

the ships sail away

 

past the golden net

of woven tears

in solitude

I wonder sometimes (more often than not) at the lack of thought many of our comments have. I mean – we can’t think all the time, we have to trust instinct and experience to guide us through busy times…still…I was reading an article about Rosanne Cash’s new album Black Cadillac and the following excerpt got me thinking:

Told she had a month to write something else after her mother died, Cash responded with "Like Fugitives," which lashes out most directly at religion.

Cash remains bitter at how her mother, a Catholic, was shunned by her church for many years after her divorce. And many supposedly religious people sent Cash angry mail after she spoke out against the Iraq war. Your God-fearing daddy would be ashamed, they wrote, "not realizing that he was as opposed to it as I was," she said.

"I didn’t want to believe in their God — that punitive, vengeful, angry guy," she said. "That’s not the God that I believe in and I resent people trying to project their God into my life."

I don’t agree with Cash’s remarks about God, comments like "that’s not the God I believe in…" betray our culture’s return to an age of household gods made in our image and controllable by us rather than transcendant and all-powerful. Still her comments point to what I think is a struggle we as followers of Christ have – our desire to cast judgement. We have been so VERY CLEARLY warned that we cast judgement to our own peril, that it can boomerang right back at us. There is one judge and that is God. God will judge. We need to ask ourselves if our use of God in our comments about other people are not rather like our use of a baseball bat being swung into the head of an unwary person. Are we sometimes guilty of the same thing as Cash is – defining God to suit our own personal feelings; turning God into something less than God – our own household idol that we can pull out and shake at people who we distrust or fear. This is not God. When we do this we attempt the most greivous of sins – to put ourselves on God’s throne and humiliate Him in favor of our own opinion.

It is so odd how easy it is for us to fall into this trap because the Bible is incredibly clear on what God’s position is and what ours is and how we navigate the two. It is no wonder so many people who are not followers of Christ distrust the Bible…they base their opinion of God’s Word on how we, as His followers, choose to use it.

My hope is that some will turn to the Bible to see if it is as we sometimes present it – and find that it is the living, loving word of the just and loving God, not a petty God.

BTW – I think I will buy Rosanne Cash’s album (or if it came as a gift that would be fine as well HINT HINT). The review sounds like it is a rare album that plumbs the depths of foundational human emotions like grief and loss. Check the review I read out at:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/Music/02/02/music.rosanne.cash.ap/index.html

 

P.S. Condolences and prayers to CNN movie critic Paul Clinton’s family on the event of his death. He was a reviewer who I appreciated greatly and am saddened I will read no more of his columns.