Friday, January 30, 2009

Waterlogged Pigs and Skeptical Neighbors

I haven't written for a while. And for that, I apologize. Just in case you have some sort of interest in what is going on in my life: The semester is rolling along, though I feel like I am already getting behind. This semester should be really easy, but what I'm discovering is that the less work I have to do, the less motivated I am to do anything. I end up just sitting around all day, even though I don't have much to do. I turned 21 last week, and celebrated by eating buffalo wings with some of the most awesome people in the world, plus Charlie. We had two days of class canceled this week due to wintry weather, so I was definitely down with that and enjoyed the extra sleep immensely. My intramural basketball team won our first game on Thursday, though I am currently sidelined due to my slowly-improving knee. And I am very, very excited about the Steelers playing in the Super Bowl on Sunday, and I am anxious to whip out my Hines Ward jersey and Terrible Towel for the event. So now we should all be caught up to date.

I've been reading through the gospel of Mark. My freshman year of high school, Mark was part of the text for Bible Bowl, so it's something I have read a whole lot. Because of this, it tends to be something that I skim over because I feel like I've already heard it all a million times. Thus, over the past several weeks I've been trying to really dig deeper into the book and to pull out something fresh and new to me, and it has been very beneficial and I have learned a lot about Jesus and the life he calls us to. A while ago, I came across a couple passages that really stood out to me, so I thought I'd share some of the things that really hit me.

Mark 4-6 portrays the classic Jesus that most of us probably envision from stories told in our little-kid Sunday School classes in the day. In this section of Mark's gospel, Jesus is traveling around performing miracles and telling parables. When I was reading this, the theme of Jesus' lordship was especially highlighted. Jesus is shown to be the lord of all sorts of things: storms, demons, bread and fish, sickness, death, and gravity. He's in charge. He's the man. What he says goes. All things are under Jesus' control, and he lords over them with authority.

This is also a time of great popularity for Jesus. Thousands of people are flocking to him to listen to him teach and to have him heal their sick family-members and friends. If Jesus' lordship covers elements of nature and of spirits, it only makes sense that the individual lives of all these people need to be submitted to his lordship as well. If Jesus has control over everything in the world, he is also the rightful lord of a person's life. And yet, in the midst of these chapters in Mark, two instances are given of groups of people who choose to reject Jesus' lordship, desiring rather to have nothing to do with him.

In Mark 5, Jesus goes across the Sea of Galilee to the region of the Gerasenes. There, he encounters a demon-possessed man, and he orders the demons to leave the man and sends them into a nearby herd of pigs. The herd of 2000 crazed pigs then rushes down the hill into the lake, and they all drown. Obviously, the guys watching over the pigs are a little alarmed by this, so they run off and tell the people of the town. When the people get to Jesus and see the man who had been possessed acting like a normal person, they beg Jesus to leave the area.

This doesn't make sense. During this period, pretty much everyone is doing everything they can to get to Jesus. But the Gerasenes want none of that. Instead, they ask him to depart. Why? I think they were a little upset about the 2000 pig carcasses floating in the lake. The Gerasenes were not Jews, so they ate pork. And they had just seen all their bacon rush off to a watery demise. This was a tremendous economic loss. What this shows is that when Jesus comes to town, changes are made. He changes the life of the demoniac by healing him. And he changes the lives of the Gerasenes by causing their commodity to drown. And they're not digging that. So they ask him to leave. They reject his lordship. They're upset about what Jesus did. These people would rather live with a demon that let Jesus have control.

And I wonder how often we have the same attitude. When we hand our lives over to Jesus' lordship, he promises to make changes in our lives, and this may mean stripping away some of the things we hold dear. It might be money or status or friends or sins. And we refuse to give it up. We refuse to submit everything to Christ's lordship. We keep everything in close, living with our demons instead of handing it all over to God.

Then there's the second group from this portion of Mark that says "No thanks" to Jesus. In Mark 6, Jesus goes to his own hometown of Nazareth and teaches in the synagogue. After this, the Nazarenes comment on Jesus' origin, basically saying something along the lines of "Who does this guy think he is?" After all, they know where he comes from, who his parents are, and who his siblings are. How can Jesus be so assuming to come into his home synagogue and preach to the people about what they need to do in their lives? And Mark writes, "And they took offense at him" (6:3). In reply, Jesus gives the famous line that a prophet is not accepted in his hometown.

For a long time in reading this story, I identified myself with Jesus. As a person going into ministry, I figured that his words about a prophet not being accepted in his hometown applied to me. In ministry, I will probably not be as effective if I don't leave my nest. But now, I wonder if I identify more closely with the people of Nazareth. The reason that they reject Jesus and his lordship is because they are so familiar with him. They know his roots. They know everything about him. And so, when Jesus comes preaching a life-altering message, they basically ignore what he says.

Ever since I was born, I have been saturated with Christianity. I have been in church almost every Sunday of my life. I've read most of the Bible multiple times. I go to class 16 hours a week learning about Jesus. Thanks to all of this, it is easy for me to feel overly familiar with Jesus. It's like I know all there is to know. There's nothing new. Nothing grabs me. I often think of Jesus as my life-long buddy and forget that he is the Lord that makes some pretty incredible demands of my life. I withhold my life from him and reject his control because, like the Nazarenes, I'm too familiar with him. Been there, done that. I lose the awe and wonder of who God is and what he has done and what he wants to do in the world and through me.

None of this is good, but they're things that I think a lot of Christians deal with. Have we truly made Christ our Lord? Or are we holding on to parts of our life, not willing to let him deal with them? Are has Jesus become so commonplace for us that we no longer recognize what following him requires? Are we going to be content being a Gerasene or a Nazarene? Or are we going to chase after Jesus with everything we have, offering him our lives and allowing him to make us new from the inside out?

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Show Me the Money

The spring semester has begun. Consequently, I am no longer able to lay around on the coach all day long watching episodes of House and eating Pringles. I have to get up early and walk through the blistering cold to my 7 a.m. class, risking hypothermia all the way. But really, I'm glad to be back. I prefer the company of other people to the company of all our pet cats. And people generally leave a lot less hair on all my clothes.

I want to write today about something I've thought about for a while. It has to do with how modern American churches handle church offering. Now this probably isn't really a big issue, but I think it's worth considering. Now here's how the collection of offering looks in most churches. Someone will get up and make an offering appeal, often referring to the story of the poor widow giving her gift in the temple. After a brief prayer, the plates are passed throughout the pews, and congregants place their personal checks in the plate and pass it along. Afterward, the gifts are handed over to the church treasurer, and he goes to some room and counts it up. Then, as tax time approaches, church members receive statements of how much money they gave over the year so that they can pay less taxes or whatever. I don't really know how tax stuff works, but that's how I understand it.

When Jesus talks about giving to the needy in the Sermon on the Mount, he says, "Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you" (Matt. 5:3-4). In America, a ton of people give their offering by writing out a check. I find it hard to fit Jesus' words about giving in secret to our practice of giving money with our names printed on it. And then we get statements telling us how much we give in a year so that we can let our accountants know and pay a few less bucks to the government.

I understand why people write checks for their offering. A lot of people today don't like to carry cash, and it's a lot more convenient and whatnot. They don't do it to draw attention to themselves at all. And I don't mean to judge anybody or anything like that. There are many more significant problems that I could write about. I just think it's kind of an odd practice that our churches have adopted, and I wonder if there is a better way we can practice Jesus' command to give in secret.

Charlie, Ryan, and I watched all five "Planet of the Apes" movies this week. I suggest you do likewise.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Thorns in the Path

For the past few days, I've been off at Ozark's Spiritual Formation Retreat. And it was fantastic. Definitely one of the best things I have done in my time at Ozark. It really focused me for the upcoming semester and helped push aside a lot of things that distract me from God. And not only that, but it gave me a lot of things to think about, and thus to blog about! And I know all of you are oh so excited for that!

One day on the retreat, we were told to go out and just walk, observing the things around us, praying, and asking God to speak to us. And so I began to walk. There was a wooded area behind the retreat center, so I decided to head for that. And I soon discovered that I was not really on any kind of path but was instead just trekking straight on through the trees and everything else that was there. So of course, I came upon a number of obstacles that hindered my journey: logs, thornbushes, etc. Normally, all of that stuff would be no problem for me, but as a lot of you know, I injured my knee about a month ago. And although my knee is doing a whole lot better and didn't cause me any serious problems on my hike, it's still not 100%. Thus, the thorns and other obstacles became somewhat more daunting. Objects that I would normally be able to jump over or step around were a little more challenging. On my hike, there were two different types of obstacles: external obstacles (the logs and thorns) and internal obstacles (my knee). The challenge of the external obstacles was amplified by the severity of my internal obstacle.

And now for the metaphor. Think of life as a hike. In the walk of life, we are faced with a number of external obstacles that we can't really do anything about: tragedies, family situations, financial problems, etc. In addition, we all possess some amount of an internal obstacle, whether it be some sin or attitude or whatever. A person without an internal obstacle would be someone whose heart is completely right before God in faith, love, and hope. And I wonder how many of the external obstacles we face are only so difficult because we allow internal obstacles to drag us down. Just as I would be more able to tackle the fallen tree limbs on my hike if my knee were totally healthy, I suspect we would be more equipped to handle life's problems if our hearts were spiritually healthy.

I think about people in the Bible who went through especially hard times, like Joseph and David and Job and Paul. All of these guys handled life's troubles a whole lot better than I do. Why? Likely because they had right hearts. They didn't have as many internal obstacles magnifying their external problems. They nurtured their spirituality so that when tough times came, they were able to handle the situation.

Bad things happen, and they have the dangerous ability of pulling us down. It can seem so impossible to get through an awful circumstance. But if we prepare ourselves now by recognizing our internal obstacles and minimizing them, I think we'll be be much more ready for what the world throws at us. Don't let a bum knee keep you from jumping over thornbushes.