The Internet Monk Archives

Saturday Ramblings 10.12.13

Take a look at the date today. What number is missing? Eleven? Ah, but it’s college football Saturday. And how many men are there per side in football? That’s right—eleven. So can we say today is 10 (11) 12 13? Sure we can. Because we know just how important numbers are to being a Christian, right? Let’s see, seven is the perfect number, or is it three? Twelve means something, and 24 means something twice. And as Three (perfect number) Dog Night tells us, one is the loneliest number. Two can be as bad as one—it’s the loneliest number since the number one. Yeah. So get out your calculators, set your slide rules for “stun,” and let’s get ready to ramble.

Now here is a really big number: 1700. It has been 1700 years since the Edict of Milan, and many are still complaining about it. How did you celebrate this anniversary?

Here’s something that may interest only me. We are a host family for students attending University Language Institute here in Tulsa, a school where students from around the world can come and learn English. Or at least Oklahoma English, which often passes as the real thing. One student living with us right now is Mohammad, a young Muslim man from Saudi Arabia. As I drove him to school one day this week I told him I had an interview for another job. “I hope you do well,” he said. “And I’ll pray for you.” I have never had a Muslim offer to pray for me before. I thought it was really cool.

Bill O’Reilly has another book in his “Killing” series out: Killing Jesus. But Candida Moss thinks he has gotten some of his facts mixed up. I think I’ll stick to the gospel accounts, thank you.

Continue reading “Saturday Ramblings 10.12.13”

I am called a “Christian”

One day a vision came my way
About a Christian found today
A Christian who’s supposed to be caring
A Christian who’s supposed to be sharing
But instead a man who would knock his brother down
Is what I found
And he is called a Christian

And in accord with his belief
He gives his money for relief
To help the needy and to help mankind
Or is it just to satisfy his mind
He’s so generous with his property and wealth
But not himself
And he is called a Christian

And I was saddened to behold
This vision of a heart so cold
And as it started to dim quickly
I cried out “Help me Lord that I might see!”
What he showed me made me want to turn and flee
For it was me…
And I am called a “Christian”

– C. Doucette

Pardon the language, but I suck when it comes to helping the poor. My church does too. Then again, I am even worse when it comes to being involved in the lives of the poor. I/We give financially to charities working with the poor, but that seems to be about it. The song was written by a friend of mine, and we used to sing it at churches around town in the early eighties. As I look at my life now, it pretty much sums it up.

Perhaps it is related to the fact that I am typing this on my laptop, sitting on a comfortable house, in my comfortable home, in my comfortable suburb. Or in the words of the parody by Scott Wesley Brown which I also used to sing: “I’ll serve you here in suburbia, in my comfortable middle class life.” How is it that I have become that which I ridiculed when I was younger?
Continue reading “I am called a “Christian””

Let’s Discuss: Church and Social Justice Ministries

I encourage you to go and read Ed Stetzer’s piece at CT, “New Research: Protestants Increase Involvement in Social Justice.” Stetzer cites recent research that indicates that Protestant churches in the U.S. are having a growing awareness of and involvement in social justice ministries “aimed at caring for the forgotten, disenfranchised, and oppressed.”

I’d like to know what you think of his findings.

I’d also like to know if you have found this true in your experience with churches recently. Is there more of an emphasis on caring for the poor and marginalized? If so, how does this manifest itself? What do you see churches and Christian people actually doing in service to their needy neighbors?

Stetzer offers this theological conclusion to his piece, which I think is pretty good:

Jesus defined his ministry as being focused on the poor, the captive, the blind, the oppressed (see Luke 4:18). So we join him on mission not only when we proclaim the gospel but also when we confront injustice, touch human need, and seek to bring about changes that make at least one part of the world more like God intends it to be.

Because Christ’s reign has already been inaugurated though not completed, the church has a meaningful role within the “already, but not yet” time we call the present. More than just “having a role,” we sense inside us a God-given desire to serve the hurting, to restore the broken, and to minister to the marginalized with the tools and opportunities God has placed at our disposal.

Christians have always believed that they can’t preach Jesus and not care about justice or, conversely, that they can’t have true justice without pointing people toward Jesus the Just. The numbers seem to show that more churches are catching that mission.

Words are good, but what are you seeing on the ground?

Another Look: Always a Neighbor

First posted in September, 2011

A friend of mine told me of an experience he had recently. He was feeling quite sick one day, and so he went to the clinic for what turned out to be an upper respiratory infection. He couldn’t see the regular doctor, who was booked up, so the office staff set him up with another. It turned out that my friend had met this other doc before, whom he described as a kind, gentle man with a positive spirit, enhanced by a comforting lilting Irish accent.

He checked my friend over and made his diagnosis, giving him a prescription along with counsel to rest and so on. As they were talking, he discovered that my friend worked for hospice. Well, the physician told him that his wife happens to be a hospice patient, with end-stage ovarian cancer. It also turns out that my friend had encountered his wife before she got sick, in several care settings. She is a lovely Irish Catholic lady who has devoted her life to visiting the sick and caring for the unfortunate; one of those rare people that just breathes encouragement, comfort, and affirmation into every situation she enters.

The doctor’s halting words made it obvious that he needed to talk. So, the patient found himself extending his stay in the examination room quite a bit past the usual perfunctory exam and wrap-up. After the doc told how his wife was doing, my friend asked about him, how he was coping and getting along.

“Well,” he said, “she’s handling it a lot better than I am. She seems to have accepted things, and I’ve told her that’s all well and good, but it doesn’t mean I’m not going to be pissed off.” He chuckled at the same time a tear slipped down his reddened cheek. That was a surprisingly revealing, personal comment for a physician to make to a patient. My friend said he felt honored that the doctor was comfortable enough to share it with him.

After talking for a while more, they parted and my friend asked him to give his dear wife a greeting, wishing both of them help and blessings from God. The physician for his part indicated that it had been good to talk. Little had this suffering friend of mine expected that a trip to the doctor for his needs would turn into an opportunity to minister to the doctor for his needs.

We may punch in and out of work. We may leave the worship service, having offered our praise and thanksgiving. We may put appointments on our calendars and make our To-Do lists and plan our agendas, checking things off as we complete them. But as human beings, we are never “off the clock.” All around us people are going through situations few imagine or understand. God may lead you or me, at any time, to help someone. Every road we walk leads to Jericho.

It is always time to listen to and love your neighbor.

The Surplus Population

Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters.Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?

– James 2:5-7

“It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”

* * *

God has chosen the poor. We do not.

In his NY Times opinion piece, “Rich People Just Care Less,” Daniel Goleman writes,

A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power. This tuning out has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing. Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard, through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation and interrupt or look past the other speaker.

…A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain. In 2008, social psychologists from the University of Amsterdam and the University of California, Berkeley, studied pairs of strangers telling one another about difficulties they had been through, like a divorce or death of a loved one. The researchers found that the differential expressed itself in the playing down of suffering. The more powerful were less compassionate toward the hardships described by the less powerful.

In short, those high up on the ladder give little thought or time to those below them. To them, “the poor” are, in Scrooge’s memorable phrase, “the surplus population.” However, lest we breathe a sigh of relief that we are not those “rich people” with little sensitivity or compassion, Goleman notes,

Of course, in any society, social power is relative; any of us may be higher or lower in a given interaction, and the research shows the effect still prevails. Though the more powerful pay less attention to us than we do to them, in other situations we are relatively higher on the totem pole of status — and we, too, tend to pay less attention to those a rung or two down.

Daniel Goleman cites this research to make a political point about inequality in America, but I am not interested in discussing politics or economics. My purpose is much more personal and pastoral. For I have seen this dynamic to be pervasive and little acknowledged in churches and Christian communities, and I can hardly think of an attitude or behavior more contrary to what should be the outworking of the Gospel.

The church growth movement exacerbated this social problem when it promoted its philosophy of homogeneity. The largest megachurches grew in the suburbs, where they could capitalize on the fact that life was all about birds of a feather flocking together. So they began targeting people who looked alike, had similar backgrounds and life experiences, drove the same cars, and shopped at the same malls.

That situation has been changing for some time now, and no matter where we live (unless it’s in a very select neighborhood), our neighbors may be “the poor.” Furthermore, we come into contact with people in challenging life circumstances everywhere, whether it involves the overt poverty of the panhandler at the interstate ramp or any number of more subtle socioeconomic or psycho-social difficulties faced by individuals and families in our churches and communities.

Will our churches adapt and learn to welcome, include, and involve “the poor” in our congregations? Will we listen to them, embrace them, honor them?

Continue reading “The Surplus Population”

Anger, Wrath and Sloth

Wanting to punch people in the nose is probably not a good attitude with which to go around. I’m fairly sure it’s also not a particularly Christian attitude, not if I take the “Turn the other cheek” bit seriously.

I’ve been angry lately. I’ve been angry for a while, in fact, and I notice I’m both getting angrier and getting angry more easily. I am swearing more, and using profanity more readily both in speech and in writing. That’s all part of it.

Anger feels great, sometimes. It revs you up, gives you a burst of energy, and most importantly, makes you feel like you’re doing something.

Some idiot writes or says something particularly stupid and insulting on the internet? Hit the keyboard and write a blistering post to excoriate him or her, then bask in the glow of gratified fury.

This is great, because it makes you feel like you’ve done something, anything, when in reality you haven’t affected the situation at all. You very probably haven’t changed anyone’s mind by firing off your angry shredding of their position, and very likely entrenched them in their position. So it’s entirely possible you’ve made things worse, not better.

And yet, the opposite of anger is sloth a shrugging, careless, “what can you do?” attitude that tells us that it’s impossible – or at least highly unlikely – that we can change anything, so it’s useless to even try. That makes us accept that this is the way the world is, life is unfair, you can’t fight city hall.

Continue reading “Anger, Wrath and Sloth”

A Sudden Burst of Light

So he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.”

– Genesis 32:27

* * *

If you’re lucky, there comes a moment, a moment of clarity.

At this moment, “the hopes and fears of all the years” find some resolution.

It involves an unveiling. Heavy drapes of self-denial are rent in twain from top to bottom.

A sudden burst of light, and you can see.

The game is over.

The mask is lifted.

Your hiding place discovered, there you are, naked as the day you were born.

And all it may take is a question you’ve been answering all your life. Except nobody will ever have asked it like that. Nobody will have ever looked so deep in your eyes while the pain from your wounded hip throbs and scenes from your life race through your mind.

You are Jacob. There, you said it.

And you’ve been limping ever since.

Never has your path been so straight.

Randy Thompson: Following the Horses in the American Parade

Note from CM: I’m happy to share a post by Randy Thompson today. Randy has been in ministry for over 27 years, with 21 years of pastoral experience in New England. These days he and his wife Jill offer hospitality, encouragement, and spiritual refreshment to other ministers at Forest Haven, a retreat center in the hills of New Hampshire. He blogs at the Forest Haven site. I hope you’ll be encouraged and challenged by his Jesus-shaped words today.

* * *

Following the Horses in the American Parade
By Randy Thompson
Forest Haven, Bradford, NH

Protestant churches follow American culture much like the man with the broom and shovel follows the horses in a parade. Liberal Protestants can be counted on to fit their ever shrinking theology into latest intellectual fashions. Evangelicals, while largely oblivious to the intellectual fashions of the past 150 years, can be reliably counted on to package the Gospel in the latest pop culture fashions, so that it’s hard to tell in some churches whether you’re worshiping or attending a rock concert or are part of some sort of weird reality show.

Being in the world but not of it has been reduced to following the horses in the parade with a broom and shovel. You’re in the parade, but not of it. You have the happy and illusory feeling of being relevant without realizing exactly what it is you’re relevant to. Unfortunately for you, the happy bystanders watch the parade to look at the bands and the horses, not at the folks with the shovels.

It’s important to understand one’s place in life’s parade. To think you’re part of the parade because you’re part of the clean-up brigade is to be sadly misinformed about your role, and rather self-deluded about your importance to the spectacle. No matter how hard you try, you and your broom and shovel will be lost amid marching bands, horses, and beauty queens. To think you’re part of the parade—that people are watching you—is to be sadly deluded.

And yet, there is a real need for the people who follow the horses with brooms and shovels in the great American parade. It’s just that they need to see themselves for what they are. They’re needed, not because the parade needs any more marchers, but because the parade leaves a colossal mess in its wake. And it’s not just the horses that make the mess. . .

Following the Savior who washed his disciples’ feet entails taking up shovels and brooms to clean up the filth, ruin, and wreckage left in the wake of the American parade. Someone has to clean up after it. Someone has to tell the truth about the mess, someone has to throw out the lies of a death-dealing culture where Caesar offers sugarplum fantasies of military glory to the poor and disposable. Where human life matters only insofar as it is convenient. A culture where health care is a luxury for the wealthy, a dream of the poor, and bankruptcy for everyone else. Some ambassador from God’s Kingdom has to tell the truth about a culture where the common good is prostituted to political advantage and then buried under litter-strewn mounds of cheap rhetoric about freedom and choice, which for most people boils down to choosing between K-Mart or Walmart.

And someone has to care about the people the parade ran over—the lost, the losers, the addicted, and the not-so-bright, the uneducated and the weak. The people for whom normal family life is only an educated guess and for whom there is no spiritual foundation on which to build an identity. The people who know there must be some purpose in life, but who have no idea who God is, or His Son, or what that purpose might be.

Who else but the ones whose feet have been washed by the Son of God can pick these people up once the parade has gone by and gone over them? Who else but these little christs can see this procession for what it is—an extravaganza of marching bands, clowns and horses parading by with the hope no one will notice the dry-rot breaking through the gaudy colors?

And who but these little christs will think to ask where the parade is headed, and what it’s about?

Certainly there will be those hip souls who will continue to carry their brooms and shovels, marching on as if they’re part of the parade, unaware of the savage irony of their position or what it is that’s stuck on their shovels. The hipsters, aesthetic and intellectual, who embrace every cutting-edge cultural trend and academic theory, and who in profoundly ironic mode see themselves in the parade but not of it, these we will always have with us.

But what is needed are not hipsters but schlubs, little christs humble enough to help the schlubs run over by the parade to get back on their feet, to get them out from under the parade and its spell and onto a different way, a narrow way, which can be difficult to find unless you look hard for it, and unless you have someone to show you the way. A way that’s as broad and narrow as the welcoming outstretched arms of the crucified Messiah.

The Homily

Delight yourself in the Lord; And He will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:4, NASB)

But for all who did receive and trust in Him, He gave them the right to be reborn as children of God; He bestowed this birthright not by human power or initiative but by God’s will. (John 1:12, 13, The Voice)

Perhaps the most asked question by Christians, at least in the West, is, “What is God’s will for my life?” I know I asked it a lot when I was in college, referring to what vocation the Lord would have me pursue. I’ve heard others apply it to whom they should date or marry, where they should live, what kind of car to buy, or whether to supersize their lunch order. Finding the will of God seems to be very important to many—or could it be that we find it very important to have God put his stamp of approval on what we want to do?

So much of the time I find myself torn when I sense a desire in my heart. If it is something that seems enjoyable, I figure it must not be God’s will for me, but just my own fleshly desire. If, however, it is something that I would normally avoid, I think that God must be leading me to do it. It’s the old “I’m afraid to submit to the will of God because he might call me to go to Africa” syndrome.

While on a weekend retreat to the Abbey of Gethsemani several years ago, Father Damion, the guestmaster, gave a talk on the will of God. He said that most people who say they are seeking God’s will actually want to know what God will approve of so they can go and do it in their own strength. We don’t want to give over control of our lives to God. We want a checklist of things to follow so we can maintain the illusion of control, but also seem to be trying to please God.

“God is working in us all the time,” said Fr. Damion, “but we prefer the darkness of our own wills and efforts.”

After his talk I waited to talk with Fr. Damion alone. I asked him, “Why is it that when I desire something I often think, ‘Oh, this can’t be from God. He would not want me to desire something like this.’?” Fr. Damion answered, “Because the enemy wants us to live where he lives—in despair.”

Then he said something that both puzzled and shocked me. “YOU,” he said, “are the will of God.”

Let us go back to our Gospel reading this morning. We are made children of God, not by the work of man, but by the will of God. It is God’s will that you and I are his children. Not that we do this or that, or that we accomplish certain things, or live certain places. He wants us as his children. Oh, certainly there are many examples in Scripture and in church history of God leading men and women to do specific tasks or live in specific places. But I think those are exceptions rather than the rule. For the most part, God wants us to just live according to our hearts. As we delight ourselves in him, the psalmist says, he will put his desires in our hearts. And we can trust him to give us desires that will please him.

Continue reading “The Homily”

Saturday Ramblings 10.5.13

It has been a wild week here at the iMonastery. There is considerable unrest here, to the point where we were afraid of an iMonk shutdown, just like our beloved federal goverment. The Iced Tea party was insisting on watching Wheel Of Fortune, while the Curly Wig party wanted to watch Family Feud. We settled it the old-fashioned way: I unplugged the TV and we played Monopoly. Then there erupted a disagreement over got to be the shoe and who got to be the iron. What a way to run a railroad. Sigh … shall we ramble?

The government is closed for business, thanks to the children who run the joint. It was reported that some 800,000 “non-essential” government employees were told to stay home. If they are non-essential, should they even come back? One preacher says our nation needs to be delivered from the Tea Party. And check out some tweets making the rounds. I especially like what some hecklers in the 18th century resorted to doing. Can we try that today? I would pay good money to see cats hurled at politicians. Who wouldn’t?

Senate chaplain Barry Black tried his best in his prayers to prevent the shutdown.

The changes under Pope Francis continue to set him apart from those who came before. He now calls the atmosphere at the Vatican as “narcissistic” and needs to change. In a first, the Vatican bank opened its books for scrutiny, publishing their first annual report ever. But do they give a free toaster when opening a checking account?

Continue reading “Saturday Ramblings 10.5.13”