Growing Young/Best Neighbors

Sunday, June 16, 2019

            Religion is about rules.  Christianity is not a religion, it’s a relationship.  What an absurd statement!  When you look at the census form, where it says “religion,” Christianity is right there as one of the choices.  Doesn’t Christianity have rules?

What does Jesus say about this?

When asked what commandment (a/k/a “rule’) was the greatest, Jesus went straight to the rule book – the Law of Moses found in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the first five books of the Bible. 

            A Pharisee lawyer asked Jesus, “Teacher, which commandment is greatest” (22:36)?  Jesus responded by quoting Deuteronomy 6:5. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.”  This was not originally from Jesus.  He got this from Moses.  He doesn’t say anything about relationship.  This is a rule.  According to Jesus it is the rule, and if we want to follow him we are commanded to obey it. 

            Then, he adds a second rule which he says is like the first.  “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  Again, this is not a Jesus original.  He’s quoting the Law of Moses here, Leviticus 19:18.  God says there, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”  That’s the rule.  Why?  God is Lord, Master, and God says so.  That’s all the reason we get. 

A lot Christians kind of ignore much of Leviticus because the instruction is a set of guidelines for sacrificing animals in worship.  We don’t do that.  Because Jesus was the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, we don’t kill animals and sacrifice them to show our devotion to God.  So, Leviticus is disregarded only to be read by the zealous Christians doing one of those read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year plans, and they read it quickly so they get to more interesting stories in Joshua and Judges.  When Jesus was asked what matters most, he quoted Leviticus and Deuteronomy. He gave rules, rules that were already in place: love God and love neighbor.

So is Christianity a religion of rule, specifically these two rules?  So many Christians base their faith on their relationship with Jesus.  Is it a relationship?  Is it both?

The final core commitment of the Growing Young approach to church ministry is where we will find resolution to this tension.  Our church is committed to the Growing Young idea.  We’ve spent the last month looking at the core commitments of churches that are growing young. 

1.    Shared Leadership

2.    Empathy

3.    Take Jesus Seriously

4.    A Community of Warm Relationships

5.    Prioritize Young People Everywhere

6.    Be Good Neighbors

Growing young churches involve young people in leadership.  They empathize with the struggles young people face.  They prioritize the teachings of Jesus, about Jesus, and the relationship we have with God in Jesus.  They foster an environment in which people can develop deep, true relationships both with peers and intergenerationally.  They prioritize ministries to young people in all areas of church life.  And finally, today’s core commitment: Growing Young Church are good neighbors to the community.  This means we strive to help people in our community thrive.  We hope many unchurched people will come to our church.  We hope many unbelievers will encounter our ministry and through that encounter decide to put their trust in Jesus.  Whether they do or not, we want to be a force for God’s good in our community and in the world.

In many ways we are already doing this.  Earlier this year, we built a ramp for a family living about a mile from here.  We do ramp projects like that almost every year.  The middle school a block from here uses our parking lot when they need overflow parking, like this past Thursday when they had 8^th grade promotion.  We are also the school designated site in the event that an emergency would cause them to evacuate students.  Numerous churches in our community use our facility for funerals and banquets.  We do charge for some, not all but some, of these building uses, but those who pay are glad to do so.  They say our fees are among the most reasonable in Chapel Hill and they love using our space.  Our helping hand ministry is there for people in financial emergencies. 

These are just a few of the ways we try to be good neighbors.   Young people and unchurched people pay attention to the words we speak about Jesus when they see us doing good in the world.  Helping kids in Ethiopia get an education and job skills; sending backpacks loaded with needed school supplies and gifts to extremely poor families in Appalachia; hosting big events like Vacation Bible School and the Chinese New Year celebration and inviting the community; inviting the community to our Christmas Eve and Easter services; hosting the mobile dental clinic so low income families can get free dental care: in all these ways we strive to obey Jesus’ command to love our neighbors. 

We can improve the way we do many of the things I’ve mentioned.  We might add ministries, but even if we just did a better job of maximizing what we already do, it would magnify our effectiveness in showing our town what God’s love is like.  All these good works are examples of us trying to obey Jesus’ command to love our neighbors.

When love happens in a way that makes peoples’ lives easier, relationships start to happen.  So there it is.  Obeying the command is following the rule, but it leads to relationship and in the first place we try to be obedient because of the relationship we have with Jesus.  So, Christianity is a relationship, not a religion.  Right?

It doesn’t really matter to me how it’s defined.  I categorize our faith as the Christian religion.  I participate in this religion through ritual like the Lord’s Supper and baptism, a holy book (the Bible), and regular worship.  I try to show religious devotion to God. 

In this religion, which I believe is the path to God, I have found that because my sins are forgiven, I have been adopted as a child of God.  God is my Heavenly father, therefor I have relationship with Him. My relationship with God is more important than any other relationship or loyalty in my life.  I am my best self as a husband, dad, brother, son, friend, and pastor because of who I am in Christ. 

Because of who Jesus is, I want to follow Him.  I want to understand and obey when he says, these commands are the most important.  The words he speaks in Matthew 22 come in a series of confrontations that Jesus had with religious leaders in Jerusalem in the week between Palm Sunday and his crucifixion on Good Friday.

Different powerbrokers in the government and in the temple felt threatened by Jesus.  They tried to control people’s lives and to an extent they succeeded.  Then Jesus came along and severely criticized them.  Sadducees, Herodians, and Pharisees were kind of like political parties vying for the soul of the nation.  They exercised influence through control of the temple and synagogues and through their knowledge of the Law of Moses.  Jesus knew the law better than they did.  He saw these leaders manipulating people with guilt and threats of expulsion from houses of worship and he wouldn’t have it.

Jesus helped people find their way to God. Through healing, driving our demons, and teaching about the law in new ways, he drew his listeners close to God whereas the leaders who contended against him came between people and God.  If we are to be good neighbors, if we as the body of Christ are to help people come to know Jesus, we have to love our community as Jesus loved those who came to him. 

When he quoted the Deuteronomy command to love God, he wasn’t talking about a feeling.  This was not love as an emotion or impulse.  He meant love as a decision.  To love God meant – and still means – to give oneself to God with one’s entire person. 

Do we do that?  How much of you does God get?  How much of me does God get?  Loving God in this way – the way commanded by Jesus – is a lifelong pursuit.  It’s difficult to give oneself entirely to anything: a profession, a romantic relationship, a pastime.  He’s passionate about golf.  Maybe.  To be “passionate” about something is to love so much it hurts.  Does he love golf so much it hurts?  Do we love God so much it hurts?  Are we giving absolutely all of ourselves to God?  That’s what Jesus says is the most important of commandments.  There’s no option to follow him and have Christianity be a small part of our lives.  Loving God the way Jesus says we must is all-consuming.

It is also directly tied to the second great command: love others.  Love your neighbor as yourself.  Again, the verb Jesus used to describe love indicates love is a responsibility.  When we follow Jesus, we have to give ourselves fully to the care of our neighbors.  We do this as a community and as individuals.  Jesus illustrated the point with his Good Samaritan parable.  Anyone you or I come across is our neighbor, one we are commanded by God to love.  Loving in this way gets us to “the essence of the way God created humans to live.”  We give ourselves to God and others to fulfill God’s purpose for us as the crown of creation.[i]   We were made to be in relationships of self-giving love with God and with people.  It’s why we exist.

When we come together as a group of Jesus-followers and together commit to love our community in this way, we will show our neighbors Jesus.  Seeing Him, some will see their own need for Him and turn to Him in faith.  We’ll be a “Growing Young Church.”  More importantly, we will be a faithful church and each one of us will meet Jesus in this gathering.  We will see Him in this place. 

Pray for our church.  Ask God to help us grow young and help us increase our love for each other, for him, and for the world right outside our doors. 

AMEN

---

[i] M. Wilkens (2004).  The NIV Application Commentary: Matthew, Zondervan (Grand Rapids), p.726.

Pray the Scriptures (Lamentations 1:1-4)

Sunday, February 16, 2014

          This book of the Bible is referred to as ‘Lamentations.’ Can it possibly contain any hope? Actually, yes.  We will get to that, but not at first.  It would not be appropriate to begin there.  We must never rush to Easter, skipping Good Friday along the way. 

Lamentations is one of the places the Bible declares bad news bad news that must be acknowledged out loud.  Too many voices in Christian circles fear pain, so they bury it.  In the face of sorrow they pretend nothing is wrong.  They talk of God’s goodness and how God has a purpose in all things. 

The Bible rejects the impulse to skip over the painful moments of life.  The Bible names it all – disappointment, loss, death.  I am one who is guilty of not wanting to face darkness.  I want to stick with what feels good and hope pain will go away if it is ignored.  What I share in this message is my experience of being confronted by God.  God had had enough of me turning away from the ugliness of sin and pain that fills real life.  Through praying the scriptures in Lamentations, God brought forcefully face to face with things that demand lament.

In my quiet times of prayer toward the final months of 2013, God’s confrontation was intense enough that to spare myself many days, I just played online games instead of having prayer time.  I should not have done that.  But, I did.  There were, though, enough times that I turned the computer off, opened the Bible, turned to Lamentations, turned inward, found God in the deep parts of myself, and there, I was confronted. 

For me the beginning of this portion of my walk with Jesus was our youth grip mission trip to Atlanta.  The week in that city brought me face t0 face with the black-white divide in America; the face of urban, inner city poverty and toughness of life in that context; my own tendency to retreat to the safety of my cozy life in the suburbs.  I want to follow Jesus.  Atlanta pried open doors inside me, doors that had been locked.  Without those doors being opened, my discipleship was severely reduced.

While we were Atlanta, July 2013, another important American city, Detroit, declared bankruptcy.  I sat at breakfast preparing for a day of tutoring belligerent inner city Atlanta sixth graders in reading.  I saw the story of Detroit’s demise in the Atlanta newspaper.  I felt a chill.  Detroit is a city that matters to me.

Detroit is marked by mile roads that run east-west, lines on a map marking how far you are from the center of the city.  Fourteen mile road is 14 miles north of downtown and 15 miles is a mile north of that and so on.  By the time you get to 14 mile you’re actually out of the city.  We were in a suburb.  My mom had grown up on 7 mile in the city limits.  We moved away from the Detroit area altogether, to Virginia, in 1982.  I was 12.  My grandmother stayed in Detroit on 7 mile until she died in 1994. 

The city experience post World War II prosperity in the 50’s, post Civil Rights Movement upheaval in the 60’s, and terrible decline in the 70’s, 80, and 90’s.  As the city changed, Grandma’s life did too, or it should have.  But, she did not change her habits and thus, she was mugged.  One Christmas Eve while we were all out, the house burglarized.  The crime rose, yet this little old lady defiantly held onto her life there.

She, came to America as an immigrant at age 13.  She was an English girl surrounded by Americans.  When she and my grandfather began life on 7 Mile, their family was one of the few gentile families in the neighborhood.  Most of my mom’s school friends were Jewish. 

The neighborhood changed and by the time we moved to Virginia in 1982, the Jews had migrated to the suburbs and Grandma was among the last of the white people still there.  She would not move.  There is nothing bad about an English woman surrounded by Americans or a gentile living among Jews or a white among blacks.  American, Jews, and black people are all beautiful, wonderful people.  I simply point this out to illustrate the city’s changes and my Grandmother’s steadfast commitment to honor the life she built – a life built on faith and indomitable intestinal fortitude.  She was always a minority and never felt like it.  7732 West 7 Mile Road was her home. 

Sitting in Atlanta in July of 2013, almost 20 years after Grandma’s death (of natural causes at age 84), I read of Detroit’s plight in an Atlanta newspaper, and it hit me very personally.  And to read of it while doing God’s work in another large American city with black-white racial tension amplified my emotions.  When we returned from Atlanta, I needed to do something with those emotions.  Talking to someone did not feel right.  Who would understand why I, a Chapel Hill resident, went to Atlanta, and got emotionally messed up by the news from Detroit?  It doesn’t even make sense as I type it.  I needed to talk to God; real, deep conversation.  I turned to lectio divina, an ancient method of praying the scriptures. 

A disclaimer: if you are well-schooled in Lectio Divina, then you know more than I do.  I don’t know if what I did would satisfy a ‘Lectio Divina’ purist.  Someone may hear what I have to share and say, “Hey!  That’s not how you do Lectio Divina!”  All I can say in response is this is how I did it, and God spoke to me. 

Returning from Atlanta and thinking about Detroit and thinking my own place in American culture, I had thoughts for which there were no words.  I needed help expressing what I was thinking and feeling because I could not identify it until I expressed it.  And I could not express it.  So, I turned to Lamentations and my own attempt at praying the scriptures.  What I offer this morning is my testimony of my own personal experience.  This is what I did starting in late August, 2013.  I kept up this routine (when I wasn’t retreating to Facebook video games) until the end of the year.

The first step is reading the passage that will guide you into prayer.  God lead me to the book of Lamentations. 

Lamentations 1:1-2 (CEV)

1 Jerusalem, once so crowded,
    lies deserted and lonely.
This city that was known
all over the world
    is now like a widow.
This queen of the nations
    has been made a slave.
² Each night, bitter tears
    flood her cheeks.
None of her former lovers
    are there to offer comfort;
her friends^[a] have betrayed her
    and are now her enemies.
³ The people of Judah are slaves,
suffering in a foreign land,
    with no rest from sorrow.
Their enemies captured them
    and were terribly cruel.^[b]
4 The roads to Zion mourn
because no one travels there
    to celebrate the festivals.
The city gates are deserted;
    priests are weeping.
Young women are raped;^[c]
    Zion is in sorrow!

I was in a quiet place, no distractions.  I read the entire passage out loud.  I closed my eyes and took four deep breathes.  Then I repeated, the entire passage followed again by four slow, deep breathes.  I did this four times.  This was my reading of the passage. 

The second step is meditating – thinking deeply about the text.  After reading, I looked over the passage and chose one word or a phrase.  Then, I would go over it and over it and over it some more, in my mind.  I spent an entire week on the first five verses of Lamentations.  Each day, in the meditation portion, I devoted my thoughts to a different word in the passage. 

The reason Lamentations was so fitting for me in this exercise was the phrase that began my meditations on day 1.  From verse 4, “the roads to Zion mourn.”  I chewed that phrase us.  The roads to Zion mourn … the roads to Atlanta mourn … the roads to Detroit mourn.  I was filled with sadness and helplessness and the Lamentation gave me the words and the framework to not only speak but name what I was speaking as I lifted it to God.  I thought of every city I have encountered.  I have actually done a lot ministry work in down town areas: Roanoke, Richmond, Washington DC, Kombolcha (Ethiopia).  Ironically, I have not done any in Detroit and only one week in Atlanta.  But, I have lived my life in Detroit.  So as I focused on the phrase, I thought of cities.

I also though of every occasion for mourning and grief I have known.  What is it like to grieve?  What are cities like?  What does it mean, the road to the city mourned?  The thoughts ran together in me as I mediated from Lamentations.

The first step was reading; the second was meditating.  The third step was spoken prayer.

Eugene Peterson writes, “It’s one thing to be listening to … Jesus preach the Beatitudes on a grassy Galilean hillside.  … It’s quite another to realize that God is speaking to me [as I sit alone with no one else around].  I am speechless; or I stutter.  How do I answer God?  But answer, I do, for the text requires it” (quote adapted from Eat this Book, p.103).  And God invites it.  And the Holy Spirit helps.

In my reading and meditating, God had helped me name it – sadness over loss and over the death sin inflicts on cities – cities I have known.  Next, I had to pray.  Thinking about the grief, I prayed for those kids we met in Atlanta.   I prayed for the CBF missionaries who don’t leave after a week.  They live there in that tough place and share their lives with those troubled children.  I prayed for the people who broke into Grandma’s house on Christmas Eve.  I don’t even know if those crooks are still alive.  God knows.  How desperate must your life be that you spend Christmas Eve breaking into others’ homes?  I prayed for the new mayor in Detroit, for the street children I have seen in Addis, for the poor kids I work with each year in Kombolcha and the city kids I used to work with in Washington DC.  I prayed for the people in our city, Chapel Hill, those for whom our HillSong teams have built ramps and removed trees and help in other ways.  I poured my heart out before Heaven.  What I said in those prayers was been shaped as I listened to the Word of God in Lamentations and meditated up on it.

The third step, spoken prayer, is unstructured and carries on as long as it needs to.  God is a patient, encouraging, inviting listener.  God receives all these prayer.

I ended with the fourth step.  This is where I listened to God.  At the the end of the spoken prayer, I would take a deep breath.  I had the word in me.  My own experiences and memories were awakened.  Everything I dumped on God in my spoken prayer was out there.  I took another deep breath or maybe a few.  I quieted down my mind, and sat in stillness. 

I sat comfortably, but not so relaxed that I might fall asleep.  I wanted to heighten my senses, my mental alertness and my listening.  I asked God to speak into the silence.  The constant flow of my own thoughts interrupt, but I don’t beat myself up over that.  I understand that that happens.  I imagined my thoughts as a river and I let the distractions flow through my mind and return to the silence.  Usually, I practice this silent contemplation for about 5 minutes.  Sometimes I spend much of the time forcing distractions out of my mind.  Other times, the intensity of God’s presence is such that I don’t know where the time went.

When my 5 or 10 minutes of silence was up, I recited the passage one more time.  I thought once more about the roads – the roads to the city mourn; or whatever my phrase was for that day.  I thought about it, took a final deep, intentional breath slowly exhaling.   Then I got on with the day. 

The prayer and the word stuck with me.  Again Eugene Peterson: “contemplation means living what we read, not wasting any of it or hoarding any of it, but using it up in living.”  Everything I have shared this morning about praying the scriptures culminated in me seeing the world through Jesus-tinted lenses. 

Now, that season in Lamentations is complete.  My care for the city is awakened.  As Lent and then Easter draw near, I realize now God is confronting me anew.  Just as God forced me to deal with my disregard for issue like racism and poverty, now God is forcing me to deal with another topic – spiritual laziness.  I will continue the practice of praying the scriptures, but not Lamentations.  I am now going to move to 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd John for my practice of praying the Word.  God is in the process of shaking me awake. 

The process of praying the scripture I have shared is one anyone can practice.  If you want to, but don’t know where to start, contact me this week.  I don’t know what would happen in our church life if 20 HilllSong people were praying the scriptures with this focus and intensity and raw confessional honesty.  Or 50 or 100?  We could find out.  Would you try it, 30 minutes a day, from now until Easter?  What is God going to say to you?  There’s only way to know.

One last thing; if you plan to begin where I did, in Lamentations, don’t give up before you reach the middle of chapter three.  Even in that book that serves to remind us how important it is to be honest about the pain in the world, there is also hope.

Lamentations 3:22-24(CEV):

²² The Lord’s kindness never fails!
If he had not been merciful,
    we would have been destroyed.^[a]
23 The Lord can always be trusted
    to show mercy each morning.
²⁴ Deep in my heart I say,
“The Lord is all I need;
    I can depend on him!”

This God of Lamentations, the one on whom we can depend, whose mercies never fail, is who we meet when we pray the scriptures.  God is why we pray, so my urging to each one of is that we make space for Him.  Pray the scriptures so that the word of God takes us to the heart of God.

AMEN

The Roads to Zion Mourn

Bring on the day you have announced,
    and let them be as I am.

22 Let all their evil doing come before you;
    and deal with them
as you have dealt with me
    because of all my transgressions;
for my groans are many
    and my heart is faint.

Not much of a prayer, is it?  I copied it from Biblegateway.com.  It is Lamentations 1:21c-22.  The title of this post comes from Lamentations 1:3.

Why am I lamenting, spending my prayer time in such blue verses, clouds of doom hanging low, swallowing me?

My wife and I are reading a book about Lectio Divina, praying the scriptures. To put into practice what I have read and to bring new life to my prayer life, I have practiced Lectio Divina.  I have read the passage over and over (a month ago Lamentations 1:1-5 and today Lamentations 1:21-22).  I have read each aloud, over and over.  In between readings, I do deep breathing.

Then, I listen for a word given, and pour over it in my mind.  I think about it, uses of it, where it comes from, what it could mean.  

After reading and thinking, I pray directly to God.  In terms of "the roads to Zion mourn," I thought about cities.  This first came home to me in doing missions back in July in Atlanta.  The inner city kids we tutored in the literacy camp took a lot out of me.  While we there, the news came that Detroit was bankrupt.  My is from Detroit, born and raised until young adulthood on 7 Mile Road.  She studied at Wayne State University and taught at Mumford High School.  My mom was Detroit.  

And we would go back there every Christmas and throughout the year.  We lived in a suburb, Clawson, between 14 and 15 Mile Roads.  Then in 1982, I was 12, and we moved to Roanoke, Virginia. Still the trips back to Detroit were frequent.  

So in July of this year, a city was confronting me - Atlanta.  And my memory confronted me - Detroit.  (And none of this accounts for the many years I spent doing ministry with kids in inner city Washington DC).  When I returned home to Chapel Hill from the wonderful and draining and hard week in Atlanta, I got into the Lectio Divina, and began reflecting on cities - Zion, Atlanta, Detroit. Recent events have called other cities to mind - Damascus, Cairo, Terhan, and Pyong Yang.  And of course, there is the city that newly forced its way into my heart, the city of my middle son's birth, Addis Ababa.  

God loves cities.  I don't have any specific prayer.  I went before God on behalf of Detroit and on behalf of my kids in Atlanta.  And Addis.  And ...

But really, I had nothing to ask for (and everything to ask for).  I just sit with God, thinking about cities, trying to join my heart to his.  And I grieve.  

I know God sees.  God sees the injustice and there will be day of reckoning. Setting things right is my job.  I couldn't handle it.  I'd mess it up in an awful way.  But I can love those who hurt.  I can hug and cry.  I can rally people to educate or contribute $$$ to the education of children who would not get it without help.  I can care.  I can sit with.  I can pray.  I can go.  

Bring on the day, Lord.  Bring on the Day of the Lord.  Until then, I pray and I sit with you.

AMEN