Doing Life: Relationship Skills from the Bible for Today
April 18, 2010
Intro:
Jesus said, “My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life.” (Jn 10:10b, NLT). So, then where is it?
Jesus also said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.” (Matt 11:28-30, NLT). If this is true, why does life often feel so heavy?
And Jesus even said, “I tell you the truth, anyone who believes in me will do the same works I have done, and even greater works, because I am going to be with the Father.” (Jn 14:12, NLT). Really? Then why don’t we see these “greater works” than Jesus did?
For the last little while, I’ve been feeling sort of restless. Those questions above are representative of this restlessness, but it extends to other areas of life as well. One Monday awhile ago, while Joanne was at work and Thomas at school, I decided I needed some change and so re-arranged all the furniture in the living room, just decided to shake things up, change them around, try to make it feel new. Now, those of you with more “husband sense” than me are rightly shaking your heads… you are wise enough to know that one should not assume such a project unilaterally, without consulting others who live in the same space. I promptly put everything back when Joanne, who was certainly not looking for or needing change, came home…
I’ve had to do a little bit of soul-searching on this, and I think I understand where it comes from and it is good. I want to live more. And no, I’m not talking about some brief adrenaline rush, some greater fame or fortune, or some temporary diversion. I don’t want to experience a fresh “high” – we all enjoyed one the brief moment that hockey player guy scored the big goal in overtime to win Olympic gold, and I can’t even remember his name. Sorry… For me, this restlessness is a desire for more of that “rich and satisfying life” Jesus promised, to carry that “yoke (that is) easy to bear, and the burden (that is) light” rather than these heavy issues, and to change from this feeling of impotence and powerlessness in my life and ministry to something that approximates what Jesus promised in Jn 14, because I really do want to see His Kingdom come and His will be done.
Can anyone else relate?
Consuming Fire (There Must Be More Than This…)
Fan Into Flame:
When I was younger and used to go camping, one of the great joys was always staying up late around the fire, laughing with friends, being mesmerized by the flames, watching the glowing embers that seemed to be alive. And one of my favourite challenges was to wake up the next morning and go back to the fire pit and try to get the morning fire going for breakfast without using a match. I’d put my hand over the grey ash, feeling for some warmth left over, and when I found some I’d gently brush away the ash with a glove to find that coal with a bit of heat still in it, and then I’d start to blow. I’d have the dry, tiny bits of kindling close by, or maybe some newspaper if it was desperate, and I’d place that hot coal in the middle with the kindling and blow and blow and blow, trying hard to coax just a little bit of that orange-red glow to appear, and get it hot enough to start a flame in the kindling. You have to baby it carefully – too much kindling and you snuff it out, blow to hard on the fresh lick of flame and you blow it out, bury the coal too far in the ash and you won’t have enough heat to catch the kindling.
When I bring that image into my life today as a pastor, I recognize one thing right away – I am not the breath. I can chop kindling. I can find some coals and try to brush away some ash. I can be ready with branches or paper or even logs, but the breath is not from me. Did you know that in the Biblical languages, the same word is used for “breath” or “wind” as for “spirit”? In Hebrew it is “ruach”, in Greek it is “pneuma”, and both mean either “breath/wind” or “spirit” depending on the context.
I know part of my restlessness is my need for this fresh wind to blow in my soul. You know how we feel stuck inside all winter, windows sealed tight, air getting stale? And then spring comes, and we run around and open all the windows even though the breeze is only about 12 degrees Celsius, or we drive with the windows down even though there is still piles of snow melting on the side of the road. That is what I think I need…
Sue insert song here, or maybe John 3, or maybe both…
(1 There was a man named Nicodemus, a Jewish religious leader who was a Pharisee. 2 After dark one evening, he came to speak with Jesus. “Rabbi,” he said, “we all know that God has sent you to teach us. Your miraculous signs are evidence that God is with you.”
3 Jesus replied, “I tell you the truth, unless you are born again, you cannot see the Kingdom of God.”
4 “What do you mean?” exclaimed Nicodemus. “How can an old man go back into his mother’s womb and be born again?”
5 Jesus replied, “I assure you, no one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit. 6 Humans can reproduce only human life, but the Holy Spirit gives birth to spiritual life. 7 So don’t be surprised when I say, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows wherever it wants. Just as you can hear the wind but can’t tell where it comes from or where it is going, so you can’t explain how people are born of the Spirit.”
9 “How are these things possible?” Nicodemus asked.
Groggy…
“How are these things possible” indeed. I like Nicodemus’ question; I have the same one. What do I have to do? Now, I love the right question; the right question at the right moment can excite me for days. Some of the most powerful moments of ministry I have experienced have followed on the heals of a question. Many of the most powerful words of Jesus, our most memorable verses, have come from Jesus answering a question.
But there is another kind of question that I don’t like. These are the questions that don’t lead us to life, rather they suck life out of us. Questions like, “why am I such a failure?”; or “why doesn’t that person love me anymore?”; or “why is it that no matter what I try, or how good I try to be, things keep getting worse?”.
Those second type of questions lead us into a deep fog. Or into a restless drowsiness, where we can’t fall asleep and get some actual restorative rest, but we don’t have any energy to do anything more than stare at a TV or computer screen. Unfortunately I think many people are living in that kind of zombie-like state. Some of these deep, hard questions have produced a foggy, groggy existence that isn’t really life, and people get stuck: get up, go to work, come home, try not to have a fight and in the trying not to have a fight end up just not saying anything of significance, then bury oneself is some abstraction hoping for a moment of amusement that sort of resembles something we once experienced that might be considered life.
But now I retreat to the truth: as a Christian, a child of God, and a friend to Jesus, I do not need to live in any fog. I don’t need to stumble through life half-awake and half-asleep – and generally speaking the half that is asleep is my spirit. Because of Jesus, who walked straight through death, and because the Holy Spirit continues to blow, I have hope. And I have invitation.
Today we stand two weeks past the celebration of the empty tomb, and in the church year we continue to celebrate and rejoice in life and in hope and in power. And also in invitation. Throughout our Lent and Easter season, we have sung of this truth and the invitation it makes to us, and I want to pause in that now.
He Is Risen/Come Awake, come awake… (whatever the title is!)
Peterson and Muir
One of the ways I know I am hearing the voice of God is when a bunch of different things going on in and around me point in the same direction – I see the theme in a bunch of different places. That happened to me again this week as I reflected and prayed and sought counsel with our Elders about where our journey should take us next as a community of faith together. Let me share some of those pieces that lead to a theme: One of the roots of my restlessness is loneliness. My number one area of pastoral concern for people I care about revolve around relationship struggles, and we’ve seen some of those struggles together recently. In January and early February we explored together what it really means to “love first”, and how we do that in our culture today, and then through Lent we talked about our need for discipline in creating space for God to be active so that our relationship with God could grow closer. A conversation in a course I took, a visit with some of my family, a phone call with a friend, all pointed in the same direction. Then this morning we had a testimony. And on Wednesday night at our Elders meeting the theme came together for me: we need to learn how better to “do life” in our relationships. We need to explore together the wisdom God has for us about how to be in a relationship with Him, and how to be in healthy relationships with others around us: how to be healthy friends, parents, children, spouses. We need to build some of these skills, and spend sometime in some really practical Biblical instruction for how to “do life” together. So that is what we are going to explore between now and June when I go on Sabbatical.
The final piece in this theme came on Friday morning. As I realized my restlessness was partly a desire to live more, and as I read a moving and inspiring story routed in nature (which I am going to share in a moment), it got to be around lunch time. I thought about doing what I normally do, grab a processed granola bar at my fake-wood desk, a nature scene on my computer monitor and the sun shining outside my window while I sit in the air-conditioned darkness, and continue to work. But then I thought, “naaaa…”; so I jumped in my truck, grabbed some good food at the grocery store, and drove down to the park by the river. I stifled the thought that I could sit in my truck and eat while looking out the window, opting instead to take my IGA bag and sit on a rock and experience life. Real life – not processed, pixelated, or packaged. Real life, in the real world, beside a real river. Now at this point in the story, some of you are expecting different things than others. Some of you are expecting me to continue with some beautiful, inspiring anecdote about how God spoke and was present to me through the incredible beauty of His bountiful creation, and it encouraged me out of my restlessness and empowered me and moved me deeply. I’m sorry to disappoint you… the “bountiful creation” was this noisy gull, which I like to call “garbage gulls”, which was squawking and trying to beg some bread. I threatened to throw a rock at it. It didn’t listen. Speaking of garbage… within 3 feet of me were two different McDonalds wrappers. And the river… smudgy and oily and dirty and brown and just a little bit smelly. Though that might have been the gull.
But then God did whisper, and said simply, “this is life. It is messy. It is smelly. It is annoying. There is garbage that needs to get cleaned up.” And then God said this: “and I am right here in the middle of it with you.”
I realized my – our – problem. Our culture continually paints an illusion of perfection – perfect skin, perfect joy, perfect shape, perfect teeth, perfect (and usually happy) resolution to a problem within a half-hour, hour, or maybe two hours if it is a full length movie. This illusion of perfection creates an expectation of perfection. I go to the river, I expect to find this perfect place of peace and calm and beauty. Then my expectation results in disappointment, and I miss where God actually is because He is not where I expect Him or require Him to be; and I don’t hear Him speak through the messiness because I see the messiness as the problem instead of the norm. God does not reside in perfection. God has chosen to reside in us. And to reside in our broken, hurting lives, which we live in a broken, hurting world, BUT we do so in the company of a mending, healing, reconciling God.
The final “piece” on Friday morning included picking up a little book that had been on my desk for a long time untouched. “The Wisdom of Each Other: A Conversation Between Spiritual Friends” by Eugene Peterson. Right off the bat he referenced a story from another author, which inspired me to dig up the whole story and read it for myself. I’ve had to edit it for you, because I know you don’t want to sit here for 30 minutes while I read you the whole chapter. It was written by naturalist John Muir, in the late 19th century. It is so shockingly opposite how most of us live our lives, that it spoke to me of God. Keep in mind Jesus’ words from John 3 (“8 The wind blows wherever it wants. Just as you can hear the wind but can’t tell where it comes from or where it is going, so you can’t explain how people are born of the Spirit.”)
From Edwin W. Teale, “The Wilderness World of John Muir”. 1954. excerpted from pp. 181-190.
The mountain winds, like the dew and rain, sunshine and snow, are measured and bestowed with love on the forests to develop their strength and beauty. However restricted the scope of other forest influences, that of the winds is universal… the winds go to every tree, fingering every leaf and branch and furrowed bole; not one is forgotten… they seek and find them all, caressing them tenderly, bending them in lusty exercise, stimulating their growth, plucking off a leaf or limb as required, or removing an entire tree or grove, now whispering and cooing through the branches like a sleepy child, now roaring like the ocean; the winds blessing the forests, the forests the winds, with ineffable beauty and harmony as the sure result…
One of the most beautiful and exhilarating storms I ever enjoyed in the Sierra occurred in December, 1874, when I happened to be exploring one of the tributary valleys of the Yuba river. The sky and the ground and the trees had been thoroughly rain-washed and were dry again. The day was intensely pure, one of those incomparable bits of California winter, warm and balmy and full of white sparkling sunshine, redolent of all the purest influences of the spring, and at the same time enlivened with one of the most bracing wind-storms conceivable. Instead of camping out, as I usually do, I then chanced to be stopping at the house of a friend. But when the storm began to sound, I lost no time in pushing out into the woods to enjoy it. For on such occasions Nature has always something rare to show us, and the danger to life and limb is hardly greater than one would experience crouching deprecatingly beneath a roof…
(he describes walking through the storm for a while…)
Toward midday, after a long, tingling scramble through copses of hazel and ceanothus, I gained the summit of the highest ridge in the neighborhood,; and then it occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to climb one of the trees to obtain a wider outlook and get my ear close to the AEolian music of its topmost needles. But under the circumstances the choice of a tree was a serious matter… After cautiously casting about, I made a choice of the tallest of a group of Douglas Spruces that were growing close together like a tuft of grass, no one of which seemed likely to fall unless all the rest fell with it. Though comparatively young, they were 100 feet high, and their lithe, brushy tops were rocking and swirling in wild ecstasy. Being accustomed to climb trees in making botanical studies, I experienced no difficulty in reaching the top of this one, and never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion. The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a reed.
In its widest sweeps my tree-top described an arc from twenty to thirty degrees, but I felt sure of its elastic temper, having seen others of the same species still more severely tried – bent almost to the ground indeed, in heavy snows – without breaking a fiber. I was therefore safe, and free to take the wind into my pulses and enjoy the excited forest from my superb outlook…
(he describes the sights, smells, and sounds, in great detail, remaining in the tree in the middle of the storm for hours)
When the storm began to abate, I dismounted and sauntered down through the calming woods. The storm-tones died away, and, turning towards the east, I beheld the countless hosts of the forest hushed and tranquil, towering above one another on the slopes of the hills like a devout audience. The setting sun filled them with amber light, and seemed to say, while they listened, “My peace I give unto you.”
As I gazed on the impressive scene, all the so-called ruin of the storm was forgotten, and never before did these noble woods appear so fresh, so joyous, so immortal.
Conclusion:
Now to Eugene Peterson: “The picture that comes to my mind is of myself, having spent years “getting it all together”, strolling through John Muir’s Yuba River valley, enjoying the country, whistling in self-satisfaction, carrying my “life” bundled in a neat package – memories and morals, goals and diversions, prayers and devotion all sorted and tied together. And then the storm comes, fierce and sudden, a gust tears my packaged life from my arms and scatters the items every which way, all over the valley, all through the forest.
What then do I do? Do I run helter-skelter through the trees, crawl through the brush, frantically trying to recover all the pieces of my life, desperately enlisting the help of passersby and calling in the experts, searching for and retrieving and putting back together again (rebinding!) whatever I can salvage of my life, and then hiding out in the warm and secure cabin until the storm blows over? Or do I follow John Muir to the exposed ridge and the top of the Douglas fir, and open myself to the Weather, not wanting to miss a detail of this invasion of Life into my life, ready at the drop of a hat to lose my life to save it (Mark 8:35)?
For me, the life of religion (cautious and anxious, holding things together as best I can so that my life will make sense and, hopefully, please God) and the life of spirituality (a passion for life and a willingness to risk identity and security in following Jesus, no matter what) contrast in these two scenarios. There is no question regarding what I want…” (“The Wisdom of Each Other: A Conversation Between Spiritual Friends” by Eugene Peterson, 1998. p. 12-13).
