Finding Peace in Little Things

I was sixteen years old and it was getting close to Christmas. School was out so that meant no homework to find ways to do the bare necessities in order to get by, but it didn't mean no home work. (Notice "homework" v. "home work.") Living on a farm as the oldest male child meant there was always "home work" to do,

To complicate matters, I not only had to deal with my on father, there was my grandfather and my Dad's oldest brother. All three seemed to have "parental rights" when it came to assigning chores for me to do. I look back on those years now and realize that I lived a pretty charmed life, but as a 16 year old boy, I remember thinking something along the lines of "I'd like to go just one day where no one told me what to do."

It was December 20, 1967 and a rainy day. I stopped by my grandparent's house around breakfast time, no doubt on the way to take care of some chore I had been assigned. I would be the one to drive my grandmother to the hospital to "sit with" my grandfather who  was in the hospital later that morning.  One of the farm tractors was parked out near the barn and it was back before some engineer created the muffler cover that automatically closes and prevents rain from going down the muffler. My uncle asked me to make sure I put  a can over the  muffler so rain wouldn't flood the exhaust system.

I can almost remember what I was wearing that day as I walked across the field to the barn and made sure I put the can over the  muffler. "Just one day when no one told me what to do." I did what I was asked, but honestly can't say I did it with the best of attitudes. Had my mother known about my attitude that  morning, she would have reminded me "If you're going to do it with that attitude, don't do it." Thankfully she didn't.

Very early the next morning, my Dad came into my bedroom to wake me up before dawn had broken. This time there was no chore involved, he came in to tell me that during the night, my uncle, Campbell Huxford, had died of a massive heart attack during  the night. In his early 40s, like my Dad, he was an elder in our  little country church and a very godly man.

Ironically, the news of Dr. Christian Barnard's first heart transplant on December 2, 1967 was back in the news that day because Louis Washkansky, the first patient to receive a transplanted heart, died that day. My grandfather was in the hospital when his oldest son died, and I remember sitting in his room with the news about Washkansky on and my Dad trying to comfort him at the loss he suffered. My grandfather said we should pray for Dr. Barnard's attempts to successfully transplant human hearts.

It was just an empty oil can. I cut the top off and put it on the muffler of the old  Farmall Model M tractor. It was lightly raining, but later that day it would pour down, as we described heavy rain storms. It wasn't a very complicated task and didn't consume a whole lot of my time. Hopefully Uncle Campbell wasn't a mind reader and didn't know I was thinking "why does everybody tell me what to do?"

But the important thing for me, these 47 years later, is that I did it. The last thing my favorite uncle asked me to do, I did. Obviously I had no idea how  important that simple memory would be to me the next morning when I realized - really for the first time in my life - that death has this strange way of altering life.

When I think about my Dad and my Uncle Campbell - and one of their other brothers Uncle Billy - I immediately think of Simeon, the old prophet we meet in Luke 2. When he saw Joseph and Mary bringing baby Jesus into the Temple for purification and presentation as the first born male, Simeon took the baby into his arms and declared, "Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light of revelation to the Gentiles, and for the glory of your people Israel." (Luke 2:29-32)

Luke tells us that Simeon was a righteous and devout man who waited for the consolation of Israel. The blessing of Christmas is in God providing what Simeon - and my Dad, and Uncle Campbell, and Uncle Billy -  all waited for. And even in the midst of suffering loss in this world, those who are righteous and devout  in Christ depart in peace.

And peace finds ways to bubble up in life in all sorts of ways - including the "peace" I had on December 21, 1967 in knowing that I did the last thing my uncle asked me to do. Perhaps it is these little, relatively insignificant, things that surround us at Christmas that can remind us of the greater peace that passes all understanding and is yet to come.

Today would be a good  day for all  of  us to look at the insignificant things around us and find opportunities for peace.

Grace in Action

What appeared to be a mountain of canned goods greeted us on Sunday morning as we met at One Roof, a great ministry in Newnan, Georgia. We were there to begin the morning with the Lord’s Supper and then spend the rest of the morning sorting and packing can after can of food that would ultimately find its way in to the homes of needy people.

I learned a lot Sunday morning packing boxes of canned goods.

• Some people will donate canned goods that expired in 2001 (that was the record) and that makes you wonder about a lot of things.

• I never knew there were so many different brands of green beans available in grocery stores.

• Apparently corn is the favorite thing for people to donate in a canned food drive.

• Canned tuna has a much longer shelf date than I think it should.

• Ramen noodles have uses beyond quick meals for college students.

• I’m grateful for the hundreds of people who donated the thousands of cans that we were sorting.

• I’m grateful for the people who make the ministry at One Roof happen.

When I finally agreed to start meeting with a group of committed believers – mostly young adults frustrated with church as they knew it, but a few in my age range as well – one of the core ideas was that we would deliberately find ways to serve. Our goal is that at least one Sunday a month, we meet somewhere other than our regular meeting place, have communion together, and do some sort of “foot-washing ministry.”

It isn’t that we discount the importance of singing praises to God when meeting together, or that we think that we all know everything so there’s no need for more information. Rather it reflects the heart of a group of people who believe that the gospel is all about meeting needs. If sorting and boxing hundreds of cans of food can help meet needs, then we’re willing to do that.

But, if the truth be told, every time we do one of these Sunday ministry projects, I come away believing that I’ve learned something. My friend Ben Cachiaras says “service is the new apologetics.” I think he is exactly right. I’m currently reading Philip Yancey’s new book, Vanishing Grace. Yancey, using a lot of David Kinamon’s research is concerned that so many non-believers – especially the people he defines as “post-Christian” – don’t believe the gospel is good news. Or, to use the language of the season, it isn’t “glad tidings of great joy.”

This past Sunday, watching Grace folks joyfully and with gratitude sort and box canned goods for people they don’t even know, I kept thinking that if the “post-Christian” people around could see this, they wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the Jesus story as non-consequential. It makes me more determined than ever to keep finding ways to act more like Jesus and less like some contrived definition of what it means to follow Jesus that is more in tune with the “civic Jesus” than the Jesus of Scripture.

I love the Sundays when we meet at our place and worship together. I wouldn’t want to give that up in any way. But I’m equally in love with the idea that on a regular basis, we are committed to “being church” as well as “going to church.”

This is not the world I grew up in – that’s good and bad. But it is the world God has called His people to bear witness to “glad tiding of great joy.” We have to find ways to let both the “pre-Christian” and “post-Christian” people around us know that grace is not an endangered species!

If you're interested in learning more about our community at Grace, you can check us out on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/graceacommunityoffaith.

Squinting

Anyone who knows me will not be surprised to hear me say how much I love being at the beach! I sometimes say that I’m confident God has called me to live at the beach, He just hasn’t made it affordable yet! I prefer the undeveloped beaches you can find in Florida’s so-called “forgotten coast.” Growing up, my family often vacationed at Edisto Island, off the coast of South Carolina and at the time, undeveloped and that has had a life-long impact on me.

There’s so much to see at the beach when the clutter of stuff humans make isn’t in the way. Among my favorite memories of life at the beach is standing on the shore on a bright sunny day, squinting to look at ships in the distance or dolphins feeding off shore. But to see those things, especially on a very bright day, you have to squint. However one of the problems with squinting is that it makes it difficult to see the stuff right around you.

Advent invites us to do some squinting – that’s the only way we can see into the future and celebrate in all that God has prepared for His creation when the Lord reappears in glory.  Scripture, of course is the lens through which we do the squinting. This past Sunday was the first Sunday of Advent, the New Year for Christians who choose to follow a calendar that reflects Scripture rather than the civil calendar the world uses. Among the great texts for the first Sunday of Advent this year were Isaiah 64:1-9 and Mark 13:24-37.  Both of those texts offer all sorts of opportunities for those who take Jesus at His Word to do some squinting.

Mark has Jesus saying that a new world order has been inaugurated and that is as sure as leaves on a fig tree mean summer is about to come. If we believe that, then Jesus would have us live our lives in the context of being ready for what God is about to do. “Verily I say to you . . .” to use some of the best of language form the KJV.

But if you walk down the shore of the beach with both eyes in “squint formation” you’re likely to stumble over something. So the question for us as the New Year in the Christian calendar begins is to try and determine how we can anticipate the glory that is yet to be revealed while living faithfully in the present. Another way of asking that question would be to see to determine how we live in the “here and now” but not forget the “yet to come”?

It seems that Luke understood that as he wrote the exciting story of the early church in Acts. He is neither unaware of nor unconcerned about the fact that Jesus promised to return in glory. But the story line in Acts is how a small group of confused and frightened disciples managed to create a worldwide movement of planting kingdom outposts all over the Greco-Roman world in one generation. He hasn’t forgotten about the promise of Jesus to reappear in glory – but his focus is on the need of all humans everywhere to hear the Jesus story in transforming manner.

Maybe Luke figured out how to squint with one eye and see normally with the other! That’s really what Advent calls us to do. When you look at the condition of the world as we see it these days, squinting into the future hinted at in Scripture can be a huge motivator for us to remain faithful to Christ. But if we take seriously the example of the early church under the leadership of the apostles, we will not ignore the world around us. It’s hard to squint with one eye and look off into the distance while keeping the other eye focused on our immediate surroundings. But I’m pretty confident that is exactly what Jesus has called us to do.

The kind of squinting Advent calls us to means we look forward, not backward. Its focus is on the glory of the reappearing of Jesus as a way of causing us to be concerned about the here and now and getting the gospel message out. Sadly many look to the past- a way of worshipping, a way of educating ministry, a way of doing evangelism, a way of sending missionaries to the ends of the earth – that is more about “the way we use to do it” than “the way the here and now needs.”

May Advent teach us to squint with one eye and clearly see the world around us with the other so that our lives and witness can bring the transforming news that Jesus has come to the ends of the earth and the end of the age.

Can We Talk?

To simply say our culture is a mess might make one guilty of the greatest understatement of all time! That doesn’t make we me want to throw in the basket and give up by any means, but it does make me think we need to have a conversation that addresses real issues with a level of integrity that seems missing from both sides of the infamous red state/blue state divide in these United States right now.

A few weeks ago as I read the Sunday edition of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, I carefully reviewed every story on the front page of the paper and the front page of the metro-section. Every single story would have been missing from those front pages had those involved in the story acted with integrity. My gut instinct tells me that is more often true than not.

Integrity requires that we talk about things with the kind of honesty that doesn’t sugar-coat bad behavior and doesn’t make invalid assumptions about individuals and groups based on our personal attitudes about “groups.” So, not all evangelicals are right-wing Tea Party members and not all right-wing Tea Party people are mean and uncaring. Not every mainline Protestant liberal church member is a wild-eyed liberal discounter of the Jesus story and not everyone who cares deeply about God’s creation is a tree-hugging member of Green Peace, with an associate’s membership in PETA.

This integrity thing works both ways. For example, some of our national conversation right now is that policemen and women are out-of-control users of unnecessary force that ends up killing innocent people, often young African-American males. And another part of that conversation is that policemen and women are all incredibly just people who would never use force improperly.

Integrity forces me to say, “Wait a minute, can we talk?” No doubt many, many policemen and women are fine upstanding citizens who do their very best in what sometimes are incredibly difficult circumstances to act justly. It really is, for them, about justice and not power. But that can’t possibly be true for all law enforcement people and when the “good guys” tolerate and wink at the bad behavior of the not-so-good ones, then the lack of integrity present in those circumstances creates the kind of tension we see on the front page of the paper every day right now. I am not, by any means, an anti-law enforcement kind of person, but that infamous “blue wall” has what may be unintended, but very real consequences. If we wink at one cop’s bad behavior, don’t be surprised when these wild generalizations about unjust cops become the storyline in tomorrow’s paper.

On the other side of this equation, not every kid is “a good kid.” That doesn’t mean that having done something that isn’t “good” means you deserve to be shot, but it does mean saying “he’s a good kid” when there is an official record suggesting otherwise only creates tension. I would much rather hear a parent say, “He did some bad things, and he probably did some bad things because his parents didn’t do a good job of raising him, but that doesn’t mean he should have been shot.” This “he’s a good kid” line is not unique to any ethnicity in our culture. We hear it all the time. Being drunk and driving your parents' car with a load of high school friends and losing control and killing those friends is not “a good kid” thing to do. To say that is no different than to say “all cops are unjust racists” because of a particular incident that makes us make judgments about groups based on one person.

I have no idea what happened in Ferguson, Missouri. I’m not sure anyone does – including the police chief, the district attorney, Attorney General Holder, and President Obama. Michael Brown’s parents don’t know exactly what happened and Officer Wilson has probably run this incident through his head a million times trying to figure out how it all happened. We really should be praying regularly for the Brown family, the Wilson family, and the people who live in these communities.

These kinds of issues will always create the kind of unsettling tension we are experiencing right now until our culture decides that integrity is a vital issue in a free society. Would it make a difference if every police department in the US did a better job of “self-policing” and tore down the infamous blue wall in the name of integrity? Would it make a difference if parents could somehow muster the courage to not instantly accuse because, after all, their “kid was a good kid”?

The problem with integrity is that once you lose it, getting it back is a challenge. That’s why we say “every politician is a liar.” That’s probably not true, but so many of them have so boldly lied to us that we don’t believe any of them. Not every policeman is a bad person just waiting for an opportunity to abuse his or her power – but cover up the few who are often enough, and soon we believe that is true of every single one of them.

I know some very fine young African-American males. It breaks my heart to know that their parents have had to have conversations with them that I wouldn’t have to have with my son if I had one. This isn’t an excuse – any more than it would be an excuse to say all cops are bad because of a few – but unless we are willing to have the integrity to re-define what we mean by “he’s a good kid” people are going to continue to make “group judgments” about people that are unfair.

Of course that isn’t right. But that won’t keep it from happening again and again. No person in our culture should be the victim of abusive force from law enforcement. In reality, very few are – but the blue wall of protection allows some segments of our culture to think they are. Only integrity can fix that.

It isn’t right that our culture tends to pre-judge a whole segment of our society as little more than thugs. But excusing bad behavior with “he’s a good kid” allows our culture to think it is okay to assume that every young African-American male is somehow dangerous. Only integrity will fix that.

Integrity is a core character issue, not so much a behavioral issue. Behavioral issues most often can be fixed. An alcoholic can defeat his addiction. A drug user can get the help he needs to quit using harmful substances. A thief can quit stealing. A student who cheats on a test or plagiarizes a paper can defeat that bad behavior.

But core character issues are much harder to address. Just like I saw in the Sunday AJC, the absence of integrity as a core character issue produces every conceivable kind of bad behavior.

We need to have a national conversation about integrity. 

Put Away the Hand Baskets

During the 1930-31 academic year, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was studying at Union Theological Seminary as a Sloan Fellow. While he wasn’t impressed with the state of American theology at the time, that isn’t to say it wasn’t a profitable year. Life in dormitories probably impacted how the underground seminary at Finkenwalde was developed. Hearing African-American preaching in Harlem convinced him all was not lost in American religion. Negro spirituals had a huge impact on him – and ultimately students at Finkenwalde for whom he would play recordings when he returned to Germany.

His friendship with a French student studying at Union also had profound impact. Jean Lasserre gained Bonhoeffer’s respect, though there were areas in which they disagreed. Among the areas where Lasserre challenged Bonhoeffer was in his understanding of the nature of the church. From Lasserre’s view, the real question was “Do we believe in the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, or do we believe in the eternal mission of France?” Lasserre would say to Bonhoeffer, “One can’t be a Christian and a nationalists at the same time.” (See Metaxas, page 111, Roark, page 16, 17)

From Bonhoeffer’s worldview, this question would cause him to think about whether or not the church in Germany was about Germany or the gospel. His subsequent engagement and leadership in the Confessing Church, the seminary at Finklewalde, his role in the ecumenical movement insisting that the “German Church” was not really church, and a host of other issues make it clear that Bonhoeffer came to distinguish “church” from “nation.”

While our current worldview is far less dangerous than was Bonhoeffer’s, I think his life and ministry might provide a place to stop, take a deep breath, and have a conversation about this very topic. Is our faith rooted in the body of Christ, called to renew and restore the universe to its God-intended purposes, or is it in the American political system working exactly like we believe it should?

This is probably too simplistic an explanation, but it seems reasonable to me to observe that as Hitler and his goons began to restore German pride, nationalism, and economy – the German Church became more and more willing to wink at his atrocious actions. To put that in the language of Lasserre’s question, the German Church had more faith in the eternal mission of Germany than it did in the gospel of Jesus Christ. It went to bed with dogs and woke up infested with fleas. 

Bonhoeffer would use the rest of his far too short life fighting against such perversion of the Christian gospel. Despite another opportunity to go back to Union and teach, his conscious wouldn’t let him stay in New York, and in less than two months – in July 1939 – he set sail for home because, as he wrote in a letter to his friend Reinhold Niebuhr, “I shall have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.” When you read about Bonhoeffer’s life there is no question that his faith was that the church, following the gospel of Jesus Christ, would be the hope for Germany’s reconstruction.

Despite the horrific moments that surrounded him, Bonhoeffer never pulls the old “hell in a hand basket” routine. In Ethics, he says, “The night is not yet over, but already the dawn is breaking.” (page 17)  Later in that same section, he says “Only the form of Jesus Christ confronts the world and defeats it. And it is from this form alone that there comes the formation of a new world, a world which is reconciled with God.”

Smarter people than I will have to make the legal judgments about President Obama’s executive order about immigration. When MSNBC sounds like the Messiah has come and Fox News makes you think of Paul’s man of lawlessness, you can be pretty sure it is probably a little more complicated than either side would have you think!

Here’s what I am smart enough to understand. First, I never discount the privilege of where I was born, politically speaking. To be a citizen of the United States has made my desire to follow Jesus much easier – and quite frankly likely – than had I been born in Iraq, for example. So I’m not some weird leftist who doesn’t get the blessing of the place of my birth. I ought to be thankful for that more often than Thanksgiving week by the way.

Second, my ancestors arrived in Charleston, South Carolina (and other east coast cities) before there was a United States, so I’m not all that fond of having a monarch instead of an elected leader. I am equally interested in having elected officials who understand that the nature of government like the one we have can never succeed when one side or both sides of an issue operate on a “my way or the high way” approach to governance. If the goal is to point fingers of blame at those who have created this immigration nightmare, we don’t have enough fingers!

Third, no matter how this current hullabaloo gets resolved, the nature of the transforming power of the Christian gospel will not be diminished – unless we continue to think the world is going to hell in a hand basket and use that as an excuse to not be Jesus to the world – immigrants and all!

So, please, put the hand baskets away for now. Our faith must be in the mission of Jesus, not the mission of the United States.