Love Your Enemies and being reasonable??

New blog on my other blog site on how "Love Your Enemies" need not be tossed aside simply because of what we think are hard questions... Click here!

15 days - Revival2011!

So you can watch my video message (and the life journey reflections of others) – but then follow for the full 15 days with these daily times of quiet, a short Bible passage, some thoughts, a prayer, and a song! And if you have intellectual or emotional questions about God, or life, of following Christ, look at our Q&A page or just email me (james@mpumc.org). Share with me your thoughts, quandaries, and new insights as we move along!

Revival2011 is here! View NOW!

Revival2011 is here! It’s 7pm on January 9 as this goes online! Read, view the linked videos below, think and pray - and email me when you're done: I want to hear from you! After lots of preparation (on our part, and hopefully yours too!) we begin what we’ve jokingly called “not-your-grandmother’s-revival.” Some of that is about style, as we are using modern media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, email and blogs, and also because we aren’t asking for you one big emotional moment. Yes, there is a big decision every person needs to make – and you may actually need to make that big decision a few times, many times in life.

But there are a host of little decisions that make or break the big decision. Revival, or conversion, or a serious faith in Christ, isn’t any one single thought or settling accounts with God: it’s a whole new life, manifested in a deep sense of joy, new habits, a steel strength in the soul to weather tough times, becoming physical instruments of Christ in the real world. That doesn’t happen overnight.

So we begin 15 days with a big event tonight. Those showing up in our building this evening find their seats, singing informally together as others gather. Then we begin with an amazing little intro video: “In the beginning was the Word” (you can watch this on YouTube and imagine you are there!). Then some fun, raucous singing along with Jimmy Jones: “Over my head, I hear music in the air! There must be a God somewhere…”

With images (some of which you see here!), dance, and a couple of dramatic readings, the crowd is drawn into my main message – and you can get that message right now: I sat down in front of a camera a couple of weeks ago, and got the substance of it in just 11 minutes. I hope you will watch this, now, and perhaps forward this to friends or family. It seems to me like it’s the most important thing, ever, not because I’m saying it, but because people over the centuries have found hope and life in this message – and in making a positive commitment to this message.

We also will watch pretty moving video clips of some of our Church members, people just like you, telling how they came to know, trust, and delight in Christ: you will want to watch and listen, now!

My message, and theirs, is an invitation to believe in Christ, to make a serious commitment, to feel the joy, to take a giant step closer to God, and to the life you crave. But no 11 minute message is enough. That’s where the 15 days come in. Starting tomorrow, you will get an email each day (or find all of them online now), with an image to reflect on, a Bible verse to read and weigh, some thoughts I think are essential, and even a link to a song (if that’s the kind of thing that stirs you). Stick with this 15 day program! Give it some time; don’t rush; we even ask you to be silent for a little bit of time each day.

During this time, if you have questions (of course you do!) about God, or the Bible, or other religions, or your life, come to the “ask anything!” sessions I’m offering, or check out this Q&A page – or email me (james@mpumc.org). It makes my day when we explore questions together; and I believe questions are good – and at the same time, questions can insulate us against taking steps we need to take to follow Christ. You can love without having every question answered, can’t you? And maybe we can resolve some questions and get unstuck.

Then on January 23 we’ll ask (again, but more definitively) for a commitment, a decision, a big decision that will embrace a thousand little decisions). Give us 15 days. Give yourself 15 days. Give God 15 days (or at least 15 minutes each of those 15 days).

12 year old wishes God HAPPY NEW YEAR!

This morning I heard from a mom whose 12 year old was saying her prayers on New Year’s night: She started her prayers like she usually does, “Dear God, thank you for this day…” And then she said, “Oh! And Happy New Year to you!” She went on to thank God for many things of 2010, and prayed for 2011. Later on she asked me if it was weird to wish God a Happy New Year. I thought about it and told her that I thought God appreciated it – that she would take the time to tell Him that. But what was really neat is that we talked about what would make for a “happy new year” for God. That is, what would make God’s 2011 really happy, and what could we do about it?

She went on to share what I seemed to notice this year: we say “Happy New Year,” and it’s a simple seasonally-appropriate greeting, not much more. We don’t exactly commit ourselves to helping the receiver actually have a Happy New Year. But the mother-daughter conversation raises a lovely question: what would it mean for us to commit to help 2011 be a “happy” year for God?

It’s easy to say Oh, it’s God, God is infinite, omniscient, ineffable, cradling the entire universe in omnipotent care: does it make sense to think we might make God “happy” or “unhappy”? Yet the Bible’s best insight, one shared by Christians for 2000 years, is that God is all heart, God feels even more than we do, and it’s quite personal with each one of us: we have the capacity to delight God’s soul, or to break God’s heart. This delight or heartbreak happens when we make big decisions, or small decisions, when something just happens to us or we think we are in control of things.

The fascinating quirk in this is: when we break God’s heart, our own hearts feel hollow, or thin, or even vaguely sad; and when we delight God’s soul, when we make God happy, then – and only then! – we discover that we really are happy, or even joyful.

2011 is here: Happy New Year – to you, O God? Here’s a New Year’s resolution: I will pray, and try hard, and trust beyond what I’m capable of, that 2011 is a year in which my thoughts, words, deeds, lifestyle and big and little decisions bring happiness to the heart of God.

Revival2011 is upon us. January 9, 7pm, kicks off 15 days of what I dream of being a significant beginning to us making God – and ourselves – happy in 2011, and beyond.

The Work of Christmas: Revival2011!

If you’ve listened to sermons or paid attention to some of the cards and posters I’ve noticed over the years, you may be familiar with Howard Thurman’s marvelous words that help us imagine a Christmas that does not end, but begins:

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.

On my street we see who is the fastest to get their Christmas tree undecorated and out to the curb. This year, one appeared, felled, on Christmas morning! The dumpsters and recycling bins are overflowing, the round of visits conclude and we are back to work, back to school – we’re back to normal.

And yet the normalcy of the time when the song of the angels is stilled is peculiar. We wear a new sweater. We are sporting a few new pounds – so we redouble our resolve to exercise and eat oatmeal instead of Moravian sugarcake. Maybe we make New Year’s resolutions, although I suspect this custom is going out of style – as we are a cynical people, or at least we recall previous years’ resolutions and how they never came to fruition.

And yet maybe, just maybe, the turn in the calendar feels like a new chapter, a new beginning, getting out of bed onto what just might be a new day, that 2011 might be the year we get there, somewhere over some rainbow, and things calm down, we calm down, we find new love, we become fit or finally find work or eventually discover why we exist. Methodists for decades got people to come to worship on New Year’s Eve, and make pretty courageous commitments to become prayerful, holy, to find the lost, feed the hungry, bring peace and make music in the heart.

I believe God told me, when I was in Utah back in August, to make 2011 a year that won’t be just another year, but the year you and I and others get serious about God and the life of faith, when we stop poking around the edges, or play-acting, or dabbling in spirituality, and become joyful, dogged, happy, committed followers of Christ. Revival2011 is this simple thing, and you can think of it as the Work of Christmas: give me 15 days, and I deeply believe that nothing will ever be the same. It’s hard in our skeptical culture to say such a thing – but I really believe this.

On January 9, at 7 pm, we are having a revival, not old-timey in its form (we’ll have cool music, video, dance…), but hopefully compelling in its invitation to make a big decision. But all big decisions live or die by a whole series of little decisions – and over the following 2 weeks I’ll walk us through those little decisions that are big! By January 23, if you’ve given us 15 days, I believe you’ll be glad you invested the energy, to give Jesus and a serious, joyful faith a chance.

It's not about becoming perfect: forget that! It's not about knowing everything; you may well harbor nagging questions - intellectual questions, or profoundly emotional, personal questions - that keep you at some distance from God. I will offer myself entirely to you in person or online to try to wrestle with you on these - and to help us see we don't have to have every answer before we can follow. Every relationship has its questions and uncertanties - but we still love.

And Why Jesus? Spirituality takes countless forms, so why bother with a guy who lived 2000 years ago, and is much derided in bestselling books and movies these days? I will try to share primarily my own personal story of why I care about Jesus, why my whole life is about at least trying to follow Jesus - why I love Jesus. I'm just asking you to hang with me, be open, grow, grapple, dig, reflect, take the time to do Revival2011 with me.

It’s the Work of Christmas, and now it begins. It will be some work, for you to come, or catch our online versions! – and the result will be that music in the heart you might have been missing all these Christmases and New Years.

The Christmas Train

Somehow, through the seemingly prehistoric technology of "slides" (later scanned into digital), I have a photo of me, five years old, on Christmas morning 1960, with my prized Lionel train. Like many children, I loved that train, added a few cars and signal crossings for a few years, then forgot about it. But that train made a stunning reappearance, one that brought a healing Santa never had in mind when it was first delivered.

Eleven years ago I was pecking at my computer keyboard, in the throes of trying to devise a sermon for the Sunday prior to Christmas. My week was slipping by, nothing was happening amid the sprawl of books and much grimacing. My five-year old son, Noah, kept playing in the room, showing me toys, grabbing at my arm, making bizarre noises.

Finally (and it is embarrassing to tell you what happened next) in exasperation I said, “Son, you just have to get out of here; dad has so much work to do.” Noah responded very calmly, but with words that worked some violence in my soul: “Okay, daddy, I’ll leave. I don’t mean to annoy you.” As I turned to see him walking out, I saw myself walking away from that same spot, but 39 years earlier.

I shut off the computer and my foolish busy-ness, went into the attic, and pulled out two grey “Red Ball” moving boxes. Inside were wads of newspaper – the Philadelphia Inquirer, dated October 14, 1964. A huge photo of Nikita Kruschev, a box score with Johnny Unitas’s stats, an ad for a Rambler. Nestled in the crumbling paper were chunks of metal track, then a caboose, an engine, a cattlecar – the Lionel train set that had rested untouched in various storage rooms and attics for some sad number of years.

Midway through connecting some of the track, Noah ambled into the room. His eyes flew wide open: “Daddy, what is this?” “This was my train, when I was a little boy, like you – and now it’s our train, together.” He was duly impressed, and after a few minutes, he exclaimed, “This is the coolest toy ever. I bet this train cost a hundred dollars!” I was tempted for 1.3 seconds to calculate the value of those Lionel cars at auction – but instead I told the truth: “Oh no, son. It didn’t cost a hundred dollars. It was free.”

Like my son walking away, we “mourn in lonely exile here until the Son of God appears.” Thank God that God is never busy, never annoyed. And what he gives us costs light years more than a hundred dollars. What he gives us costs so much that it really is free. God gives us no “thing.” God gives himself, on the floor with children of all ages, those who are nice and those who are naughty and those who are a messy but beautiful mix of both. God pokes us with a little finger, with a cry. And the wonder of it was described once by Barbara Brown Taylor:

“His name is Emmanuel – the God who is with us – who is made out of the same stuff we are and who is made out of the same stuff God is and who will not let either of us go.”

CLOSE TO SANTA? OR CHRIST?

Closeness. We crave closeness, emotionally and spiritually – but not always. Somebody I don’t know that well gets in my personal space, and I edge back. But the one I love? the one I want to be loved by? I want to get as close as possible.

I think Christmas is nothing more or less than God’s desire to be close to me, to you, to us. We can fairly easily conceive of God as some kind of distant power that made the universe happen. Or – sadly – we harbor a Santa Claus view of God, a jolly guy far far away who does show up once in a great while to give us things we’ve wanted (or need), but then he doesn’t stay, he zooms back to the North Pole. In fact, Christmas (ironically!) may be to blame for our bland, convenient, un-close view of God.

This must grieve God’s heart: we believe in God, but we’ve never let God get close. Somehow I have this funny photo of my mother taking me to Santa when I’m one year old – and I’m terrified; the Santa in question does seem a bit grim... I like this, though, because we should be quite terrified at the prospect of God-as-Santa, that we’re on our own until we think up a request, and then we pray (letter to Santa…) and hope God delivers.

If God merely delivered – even if God always delivered everything on our list! – how tragic would it be? You might be satisfied with a big pile of things, and making your life happen on your own – but I find a hollow place in me nothing in this world can fill. I find my mind stretching beyond the visible. I find my heart yearning for more love than all those who love me can muster. I know I must be part of something larger than me or even the best life I can arrange. I know that whenever I die it won’t have been long enough. God has planted in me a tangle of confused feelings that all add up to a need to be close to God – even if I forget that and get tricked into thinking one more gadget, one more achievement, one more relationship will be enough.

We’re planning this modern day Revival2011 – and what it’s really about is getting close to God, asking God to stay, to stick close, to love, and be loved. Skeptics get puzzled by Christianity, but I would think we might quite naturally gravitate to the love we desperately want. God wanted to get close.

How close? God stepped down, and became quite small, and vulnerable – and stepped down into a young mother’s arms. What is more beautiful, or tender, than a mother cradling her newborn? She hold him strongly but gently; she sings audibly but not loud enough to awaken him; time stands still, and all the wonder of the universe is concentrated in that very small spherical space of her arms around the small boy. All is calm, all is bright.

That is how close God wants to be to you. Can you take a big step toward God in Christ? Can you become small, humble, and let yourself be held, in the quiet calm? Don’t you cherish the possibility of such love from a God you really hope will stay?