Category Archives: Random Notions

Random Notions

Not alone out here in the uttermost parts…

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One of the interesting parts of my journey has been the initial isolation you feel when you begin the trek down a different path. The further I go down the path the more I come across others who are on the similar journeys. Today I discovered the blog of Jim Palmer. Just reading his current post, “you can’t get there from here (or can you)“, I found myself excited. One of the sentences that got me really excited was this one:

i don’t feel the need to cling to the label “Christian,” and i am okay with people who don’t think i am one.

I too have gone through a period where I was not quite sure what I had become and didn’t know how to answer the question “are you a Christian”? I can say that the only folks I’ve come across who question my relationship to God are those who are typical church goers. Especially those with whom we attended church or served on their church staff at some point. Most think we’ve had some deep hurt from the church and have turned our backs on it. We get that blank look that comes after you tell them and it’s obvious they are hoping we’ll get over it at some point and return. But when you’ve had steak you can’t settle for SPAM any longer when you don’t have to.

On the other hand, when we come across unbelievers or others going down this same path we are on, we don’t get those questions or the stares. And oddly enough, the unbelievers just notice something “different” about us and because we’re not all “churchy” they actually open up and pour out their souls to us. The opposite of the reactions we used to get, and never noticed before because we were too church-strung, of the blank stare and obviously trying to think of an answer that allows them to slip away from the encounter never to have to see us again.

So, as Jim I don’t cling to, and actually shy away from, the term “Christian” these days because of the association that it conjures in the mind of others. I’ve landed on the term Christ Follower. It’s much more descriptive of where I am and where I am headed.

Projecting the familiar on to that we’ve not experienced

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So as I cruise the Internet reading various blogs I continue to astounded and marvel at the pervasive habit of projecting the tenants of something with which we are familiar on to something we’ve never experienced.

Okay, guilty as charged. I too did this for a couple of decades. From the time I began to make my way into “full time ministry” I interpreted everything I read in the Bible through the filters of stuff I saw and understood around me. In other words, when I read “church” in the New Testament I projected what I saw a church to be in my culture and time onto what I read. Almost as if the Ephesian “church” looked and functioned just like First Church Anytown I was familiar with. They had Sunday School in the morning on Sundays right? Well, that’s a little too simplistic but you get the idea. When I read “pastor” I projected what I had always known as a “pastor” back on to what I was reading. When I read Paul’s letter to the church at Galatia I read it envisioning a group of people gathered on a certain day seated in orderly fashion where a designated person read the letter as part of the “service” being conducted. I envisioned a “pastor” speaking

That’s a dangerous flaw in the way we read and study. I know, I know, that’s why we do all that deep Bible study and ferret out the meanings and culture and history. But the fact remains, my impression of what the New Testament Christ Followers were like was tainted by my own experience. I knew nothing else.

Last year I began to escape the decades of filters that had for so long kept me from understanding the life and ministry of Jesus and what He left to his disciples. The mission He left them. Not the mission I was taught being projected back on to what He said at the end of Matthew, but more of what He was truly saying to them. Since then, my eyes have been opened to understand things from my reading that had before never quite connected. Now, the rationalizations I had made as to why something I read in the Bible didn’t seem to fit with other stuff I read in the Bible began to no longer be necessary.

I’m anxious at some point to try once again to learn to read Greek and may attempt (yeah right) Hebrew. I’m wondering how much of what we read in a translation could be skewed by that which the translator is familiar with and takes on today’s meaning rather than the meaning for which it was written. I know. I know. This is a Pandora’s box. But nonetheless, one worth considering.

There IS truth to be learned from Star Wars (and beyond!)

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Anakin Skywalker… watching the final installment in our Star Wars epic watch-a-thon (several evenings through episode 1-6) a thought occurred to me…

(haha, check out this article I found looking for the picture to the right…)

Thinking of our brother Aaron Horton’s now famous (with me anyway) quote:

No matter who you are, where you’re from, or what perspective you have in life, all of us can recognize a common theme emerging in the world. We see it in the stories we love, we see it in history, we see it in our own lives. There is beauty and innocence, interrupted by tragedy and sadness, followed by longing for rescue, and hope for a better day. We love the stories best where a hero comes along to set the world right and bring a new day to pass where we return to that place of beauty and innocence again…changed of course…but back home again. That story is older than the middle ages, the roman empire, or even the Bible. It is the story written on the very heart of God…woven into our lives because we were made in His image.

… I began to realize that if I believe what Paul talks about in Romans and understand that we were all created in the image of our father originally, only we’ve lost touch with it through our sinfulness…

… it becomes apparent that there WILL be hints of the character of God in all the stories even the fallen man tells. In the things we (mankind) hold to as ideals; love, peace, hope, etc., and the things we loathe; hate, lust, jealousy, even from a worldly perspective; we can see and point to God. Because God’s image is “in our DNA” the hints of that image will be present in the work done by the creator’s creation. WHOA!

That’s why so many of the amazing quotes in movie after movie, book after book, song after song, etc. after etc. can point to the essence of real truth! Sometimes even more honest about it than we tend to be in our own religious lives:

Anakin Skywalker
“Mom, you said that the biggest problem in the universe is no one helps each other.”

Qui-Gon Jinn
“Your focus determines your reality.”

Anakin Skywalker
“Attachment is forbidden. Possession is forbidden.”

Qui-Gon Jinn
“Remember, concentrate on the moment. Feel… don’t think. Use your instincts.”

Luke
“Jedi Masters don’t go crazy — they just get eccentric.”

… just a few… many more there are! (sorry, could not resist)

I think the depth of Aaron’s insight sunk in to a whole new level last night! All those stories which portray pieces of kingdom truth just askew from our naturalized man point of view…. hints of truth from the wrong foundation/perspective… Wow!

Press on!

Mark 13:31

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This was just interesting. Jesus said:

“Sky and earth will wear out…”

So we can’t save the planet?

This set off a whole trail of thinking about the dirt we walk on. In college I wrote a paper on the responsibility of Christ Followers to show respect for everything that God created. Respecting something that belongs to someone else is one of those basic lessons which should have been taught to everyone at an early age (that may be a whole new post though…). And, there you go. The key… belongs to someone else. The American culture focuses a great deal on the concept of “ownership”. Your house, your car, your land. But in truth, the vineyard still belongs to the true owner and we are all simply the farm hands left to care for the property of the true owner. We buy and sell, which further reinforces the illusion of ownership. Yet ultimately do we really believe the words which come from our mouths… “it all belongs to God”? By “believe” I mean do our actions and attitudes really show that we believe nothing “belongs” to us? What does that look like? How do we as Christ Followers live that reality in an “ownership”, “buy and sell” focused society?

Have you ever observed someone clinging to something they deemed of value as the true owner, understanding its lack of value in the grand scheme of things, looked on shaking his or her head sympathetically?

But a mere shell of what it used to be…

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Former shellI would guess one out of my one readers here already knows that I used to serve on staff at what churchites like to call a local body here in Aurora CO. For almost five years the pastor and I labored to “build the church”. I drove by day before yesterday after dropping a friend off in the neighborhood. As I understand it, the group that meets there has changed quite a bit, and several times since we were there. The first thought that went through my mind, knowing what I do about the last fifteen years of it’s history was what a shell it is of what it was before.

Outside of some external cosmetic updates, and some minor indoor remodeling efforts, today, eleven years later the place still looks just like it did when Julie and I arrived there almost fifteen years ago. To those passing by, nothing but the weekly quote sign changes, cars come in and go out, and the language congregation meeting there has changed. Other than that, it’s the same place it used to be.

And yet, as I processed these thoughts it occurred to me that it was a mere shell back then, looking just as it does today. What was different was the community that gathered in that shell. A community of people who were living out what they believed to be the Kingdom life. A life which required them to spend consistent time inside the walls of the shell and then “go out” to try to bring others inside.

Since those days there have been several generations of community gathering there with some long standing threads connecting all the generations. Some of the relationships which germinated inside those walls continue today. Geography has changed over the decade and more, the shell itself has not, I wonder how many of the lives which were part of the community through those decades are different today… or if they are merely living out the motions they parroted in another empty shell?

Today’s Quote of the Day

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So this was the quote of the day served up by my custom home page today:

Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.

Isa 53:4-5 NIV

What an amazing phrase I really never was struck by before. I guess I understood the concept and read what it said, not how it said it. Read it again. Wow!