If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be Kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.

(A poem hung on a wall in a Calcutta orphanage founded by Mother Teresa)

” …we have to awaken, to think thoughts beyond the thoughts we have already thought. To get back, we have to get this, to get now: to receive the present activity of God in our midst. To get this is to take all we can know of the past and hold it out in contrast to this moment. Then we can begin to sew together what is essential of who we have always been with what will connect in the present.”

This is a pull quote from an article I wrote for the September/October issue of Immerse Journal.   I developed some themes I have spoken about previously for the article around the idea of the cruciform journey of an artist.

Artist, broadly conceived, of course.  I pastor a church, but I learned most of what I know about being a pastor from being an artist first; and in a way I think pastors are the truest artists we have left in our culture.   In a larger sense, every human is an artist, a creative being made in the image of the Creator.   And if you begin to engage life, work, and relationships as art, you may soon learn what artists know, that there are forces at work in the process that will stifle, derail, and distract you from ever making great art.

I hope my article can provoke you (as it does me) to consider the process of recovering not only an artist’s approach to life, but a pathway for dwelling richly in the deep down things.

It was a pleasure and honor to write for Immerse Journal.  I urge you to subscribe.  I’m grateful to Mike King for the invitation to write.   And as usual, I learned more in the writing than you will in the reading.  So read my article, then write yours.

You can (for not much longer) still preview my article in full at the Immerse site.   There are also a couple great reflections to the article in the “culture” section of site.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

- William Stafford

There is hardly a way to argue that.  Mass-murderer.  Terrorist.  Destroyer of lives.  Disruptor of Shalom.  Perhaps he even got off easy.

I suppose I have the same sense of relief that anyone who loves life has: a relief provided by the reality that at least Bin Laden is done exacting his brand of hell upon the earth.

Yet as a Christian, I cannot revel in any human’s demise.  And as a human being I know that by God’s grace I have not ‘got what was coming’ to me.   I am grateful to be alive, and for the time I still have ahead of me to make amends, to grow up, to make a positive contribution, to choose more light and less darkness, more life and less death.

So I mourn the tragedy that any human being no longer has that time.  Perhaps Bin Laden forfeited his time long ago.  Perhaps there does come a time when the only human response to the horror of another’s continuing devastation is to send them to God who may yet have mercy.   I don’t know.    I do know that it is dangerous to pretend we are God in taking human life.  Yet it is easier than to pretend we are God in our capacity for mercy.   For there is a wideness in God’s mercy; and we are not God.

We are not God.  That is the posture of humility that should envelope all our actions (and reactions).   Anytime we have reached the end of our ability to wait upon God to set things right, anytime we can no longer bear suffering at the hands of our enemy, we may very well decide to take matters into our own hands.   But if we must, we should do so in sober humility, knowing that God’s scandalous grace is indiscriminately given to all evil-doers.  Each one of us.

We’ve been searching for our whole lives.
And we have traveled through unexplainable stories.
Swear to God I fought the good fight,
always waiting for the coming of morning.
And I heard the Captain say, I heard the Captain say,
“The more I know, the less I’m knowing.”
And I heard the Captain say, I heard the Captain say,
“Activate your force-fields and just keep going…”

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When:  Friday, November 5, 6:30pm
Where:  Beggars Table, 2009 Baltimore Avenue,  Kansas City, MO

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“It was right you came to fold your wings a while and get your bearings for the flight to come.  But your true nesting place lies farther on.”

“Lies where?”

“Godric, this much at least I know for sure.  Until you reach it, every other place you find will fret you like a cage.”

One of the seductions that bedevils Christian formation is the construction of utopias, ideal places where we can live totally and without inhibition or interference the good and blessed and righteous life.  The imagining and then attempted construction of such utopias is an old habit of our kind. Sometimes we attempt it politically in communities, sometimes socially in communes, sometimes religiously in churches.  It never comes to anything but grief.  Utopia is, literally, “no-place.” But we can live our lives only in actual place, not in an imagined or fantasized or artificially fashioned place.

Several times when my place seemed inadequate for my vision of what I wanted to do for God, a story held me fast to my place, the story of Gregory of Nyssa, who lived in Cappadocia in the fourth century.  His older brother Basil, a bishop, arranged for his brother to be appointed bishop of the small, obscure, and decidedly unimportant town of Nyssa.  Gregory objected; he didn’t want to be stuck in such an out-of-the-way place.  His brother told him that he didn’t want Gregory to obtain distinction from his church but rather to confer distinction upon it.  Gregory went where he was placed.  And he stayed there.  The preaching and writing that he did that backwater community continues its invigorating influence to this day.  One of the features of his biblical expositions was the thoroughness and intensity with which he read Scripture as as text for living, not just for truth or ideas, but as a formative text for Christian faithfulness and obedience.  In obscure Nyssa, apart from the high-adrenalin stimulus of the city, Gregory looked around and recognized his place in creation, noticed the script of God’s revelation in the created world around him, noticed the intricate relationships and resonances between his place and the Christ of creation.

Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, 73-74

The goal for week one was to see some family, not think about work, practice being a fully present human being, and to make a dent in a long queue of novels.  We spent a few days on my in-laws’ ranch near Arthur, Nebraska.  It’s a hard place to get to, but a nice place to be.   There, I finished up a re-read and then two others front-to-back, one new, one older:

Godric: A Novel, by Frederick Buechner

Exiles: A Novel, by Ron Hansen

The Book of the Dun Cow, by Walter Wangerin

Godric was already a favorite.   It is a painful and hopeful tale about how saints become saints, or about how they are saints already…surprisingly.   Exiles is a story about one of my favorite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins.   And I can’t believe no one ever told me about The Book of the Dun Cow;  It should probably be required reading for folks who belong to a church.  It is a great picture of community and rhythm as the sinewy substance of life, and of unexpected greatness…and weakness.

Week two of vacation included less reading, but some local fun:  Chiefs training camp in St. Joe, a horrifying observational study of parenting styles and how plagues begin at Chuck E. Cheese’s, the amazing local hidden treasure that is Powell Gardens, and a private tour of the new Arrowhead Stadium, some running, lots of sweating, a quiet birthday (minus getting a surprise sidewalk-chalking and serenade from Vox students!), gathering with my church-community without doing anything, and a slow and stumbling return to hopefully creative engagement of a sense of calling in the world.

Grateful.

The role of the church is to cultivate people who “can risk being peaceful in a violent world, risk being kind in a competitive world, risk being faithful in an age of cynicism, risk being gentle among those who admire the tough, risk love when it may not be returned, because we have the confidence that in Christ we have been reborn into a new reality.” – John Howard Yoder

From DA

Certainly there are times and issues to press, while wisdom demands discernment.  I wish I could say I understood better where that line is.   I have both understated the case and not moved anyone, and I have stepped past the line for some and have been nearly assaulted.   I still am not sure if in either case I went too far or not far enough.   But I’m paying attention to both possibilities.

I’m heartened to see realistic commentary like this:

See the video here.

So why the church?   Here is Eugene Peterson’s short take:  “…the Holy Spirit formed it to be a colony of heaven in the country of death….Church is the core element in the strategy of the Holy Spirit for providing human witness and physical presence to the Jesus-inaugurated kingdom of God in this world.  It is not that kingdom complete, but it is a witness to that kingdom.”  (Practice Resurrection, 11-12)

A few folks have asked me for the long quote I used last Sunday.  Here it is:

“I would be a witness to the Holy Spirit’s formation of congregation out of this mixed bag of humanity that is my congregation—broken, hobbled, crippled, sexually abused and spiritually abused, emotionally unstable, passive and passive-aggressive, neurotic men and women.  Men at fifty who have failed a dozen times and know that they will never amount to anything.  Women who have been ignored and scorned and abused in a marriage in which they have been faithful.  People living with children and spouses deep in addictions.  Lepers and blind and deaf and dumb sinners.  Also fresh converts, excited to be in on this new life.  Spirited young people, energetic and eager to be guided into a life of love and compassion, mission and evangelism.  A few seasoned saints who know how to pray and listen and endure.  And a considerable number of people who pretty much just show up.  I wonder why they bother.   There they are.  The hot, cold, and the lukewarm, Christians, half-Christians, almost Christians.  New-agers, angry ex-Catholics, sweet new converts.  I didn’t choose them.  I don’t get to choose them.” – Eugene Peterson, Practice Resurrection, 27