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The Bride of Christ

13 Jun

This is a picture of an Indian woman adorned for her wedding day. She is dressed in symbols of flowers, gold, rubies and even henna, going so far as to decorate her very skin for the big day. But most importantly, she is wearing a red sari. Just like nobody wears white at a western wedding, nobody wears red at an Indian ceremony. Red is the bride’s color. It is the color of the rising sun. The color of new life, new beginnings. The color of resurrection.

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” Revelation 7:9-10

So, when you picture the Bride of Christ at the Wedding Supper of the Lamb, what do you see? It’s likely that most of us see a white woman in a white wedding dress, designed by Vera Wang. We don’t see red saris. And when we picture the throne room of God in the New Heavens and the New Earth, many of us probably picture this:

rather than this: 

or this: 

And the truth of it is, that’s okay. There’s no need to worship like other cultures do, just because those expressions of worship aren’t as popular. I say, if you’re a westerner, worship like a westerner. On my wedding day, my wife didn’t wear red. She wore white, because for us as Americans that symbolizes her purity before our community, her holiness before God, and her beauty before me. And I wouldn’t have had it any other way. She was (and is) the most lovely one in the room, and the traditions of our culture meant something to us that day.

But the problem comes when we train foreigners to worship like us. You might say, “Well Adam. We can’t allow worship that way because it’s worship for other gods.” Well maybe it should be for Jesus. The Indian Holi festival (pictured above) may have symbolic meaning rooted in Hinduism, but that doesn’t change the fact that acting like sweet, innocent children and chucking fistful’s of vibrant color in the air is a breathtaking act of worship. Maybe the reason it only exists for Hindus is because they don’t know there’s a Jesus to throw paint with.

The point is, it’s not about the expression, it’s about the Jesus. Once Jesus is the center of our worship, we’re free to express our worship in whichever cultural context we choose. And when we go on mission, it is Jesus that we bring, not culture that we take. As we prepare ourselves for a multicultural throne room in Heaven, may we bring it to Earth by releasing all of God’s people to worship Him in their own unique expression. As a celebration of that, I leave you with some unique forms of worship from around the world:

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How We Already Slipped Down the Slope.

4 Jun

Where the Church went wrong in the battle for marriage…

… because let’s face it, it is a battle. It is not a debate, conversation, or a decision. It’s a battle. Because at some point, someone declared the differences of values in our society to be a “Culture War,” and wars are won by winning battles, not by passionate persuasion, or non-judgmental loving, or understanding dialogue. The travesty of it all is that the Church, with her mission to influence and change every society in which she finds herself into a Kingdom culture, was sucked into these so-called “Culture Wars.” All the sudden the mission was the same, but the methods had changed. Because the American Church got caught in the gravitational pull of the State and it’s politics, she became known for changing society not by winning people with love, but by fighting them with legislation. Long have people argued over separation of Church and State, insisting that the Church would pervert the State to Theocratic Dictatorship, but have we ever stopped to think that the funding fathers intended this great divide to protect the Church, rather than the State?

So we come around to the “battle” of same-sex marriage. With Barrack Obama becoming the first pro-same-sex-marriage president, this issue has pushed its way to the front page of our papers once again. The arguments are all the same: The left says this is a civil rights issue similare to the civil rights movement of the 60s, while the right says it’s a matter of defending a healthy structure of the family unit. When I first started thinking about this issue, I was in high school, and I didn’t really understand it. I had always understood marriage to be a religious sacrement because, after all, it was an institute of religion long before a legal status. In my view of it, real marriage is a union involving God. The legal status is just a good idea, practically, but it doesn’t make you any more or less married. Take the example of CS Lewis’ life: He legally married his friend, Joy Greshem to help her gain British citizenship, but the two never lived together or functioned as a family after that. It wasn’t until Lewis and Greshem later fell in love that they officially wed through the Church and became man and wife.

When I began asking people about this, I was quickly answered with the argument that the State gives certain rights to married couples. Tax breaks, visitation rights, power of attorney, etc. So, as a believer in the word of God, I assume this: Throughout our nation’s growth, the government saw that people living together in a monogamous, covenantal relationship as the Bible teaches was in fact good for society. So, it gave incentives to entice more people to do so. (I’m no expert on political history, this is just a logical assumption of why the government would offer incentives to married couples) The irony is, in the midst of the fray of the same-sex marriage battle, nobody questions these incentives. Is it because we just want our money? No one has stopped to question this… Our little tax breaks have so intertwined the State with a Church sacrement that it has brought this fight into existence in the first place. What’s more, it seems likely that these “incentives” have enticed us into marriage for their own sake, not for the sake of Christ. When a couple weds, if they do so for the tax breaks and our hollywood-created concept of “love,” the marriage is a sham regardless of gender. So it begs the question… When we began viewing marriage as anything less than a life-long covenant that must never be broken except in very extreme cases, we’ve already slid down that slippery slope.

I’m referring of course to the argument that, if same-sex is allowed in marriage, then it is a trip down a moral slippery slope. My opinion is, we’re already here because our atrocious divorce rates have brought us here. If we want to win our culture on this issue, we must do two things:

  1. Repent for our hypocrisy. Admit that we have already devalued the sanctity of marriage long ago and change our ways. Stop the epidemic spread of divorce within the Church. Honor those who have been married for years, and support those who haven’t.
  2. Lay our weapons down. The rest of our culture is not listening to us because we do not want them to. If you present your argument on a bumpersticker, or a TV show, or hide behind a screen name, it’s clear you don’t want a thoughtful response from your opponent. You want them to respond in anger so that you can further demonize them. You are not trying to win their hearts and their respect. You are trying to beat them into submission.

This is not a post intended to side with a political force. American politics are not my kingdom. The throne of God is. And the throne of God will have only limited dominion in America as long as the American Church attempts to influence the world according to the world’s terms. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Said Jesus. “For they shall be called sons of God.”

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Poser Humility

26 Apr

It goes something like this:

 ”I got saved, but somewhere in the process, I lost my way and grew really prideful. But thankfully, Jesus saved me from my pride! He took me through a season of brokenness. This season was very painful emotionally, but when I came out of it, I knew that I had to put the Lord first in everything I do.”

If you are an evangelical Christian, the odds are you’ve heard this story before, or at least some version of it. It’s part of our mythology as western Christians. It’s a linear plot, with a definite beginning, middle and end. It’s told, oftentimes with triumphant conviction from a brightly lit stage in a church sanctuary. And most importantly, it’s very very clean. Complete with crisp clear cut edges and wrapped up with a neat, pretty bow. Bt the problem is, this story is naive at best, and downright manipulative at worst.
It’s manipulative because we all too often use it to fulfill the desires of our religious, law-worshipping hearts.

I think if we’re all honest, we can admit to having seen others use this story, and using it ourselves. I know I can admit to it. I can remember times when I’ve coveted a ministry position of leadership at church. I had known that old leaders were stepping down soon and would be raising someone up to take their place. The first symptom is comparison. You start sizing up the competition. Thinking to yourself, “Yeah. I’ve been more involved with that guy.” or “That guy hasn’t been in our small group very long, but he’s got a really powerful story…” and then you drop the bomb. You meet up with that leader who is looking for a budding young disciple to fill his mighty shoes and you lay it on. The humility story. This communicates that you are in no way a prideful person who will abuse this privilege to lead others, or allow this position to become an idol in your life. But the irony is, if that were true, you probably wouldn’t feel the need to say it.

I cringe to think of my behavior in the past. Looking back, I find it incredibly sophomoric and embarrassing, but I might as well get used to it, because I imagine that feeling will be quite prevalent at the end of time when I am sitting at the throne of Christ reviewing the instant replay of my life. I’m sure there will be some choices I’m currently making under the pretense of wisdom that Jesus will see and then say, with a grin, “Really? How’d that work out for you?” Well. Good thing He payed for all that, right?

Anyway, my central concern with this pride and humility story is that it side-steps quite a lot of scripture. See, in our brand of first-world Jesus-following, we are obsessed with open and shut cases. We like to tell stories in a moralistic problem-to-solution format. We want to tell people about the disease, and the cure. So we tell them that they are sick with sin and that we used to be sick too, but then we took the Jesus medicine (and a spoonful of sugar to help it go down) and now we’re all better! The only problem is that real sin, like it’s described in the bible, isn’t just a little virus that we fight off with some antibiotics. It is a deadly, marching cancer that roars about like a lion waiting for someone to devour. Paul describes the work of Jesus in our lives to be something more like chemotherapy. It’s a long, sometimes painful process. A journey, that isn’t pretty, but in the end, you’re promised to receive life. It’s called sanctification, a theological concept  I’m not entirely sure we’re comfortable with in our culture.

So when we talk about pride and humility, perhaps it shouldn’t be in a cleanly told tale, in which we get our character development like a happy meal. Perhaps it should be told with fear and trembling. Or with dazzling hope. Or both. Perhaps our story shouldn’t be about how we had a “wilderness experience” and are now permanently better for it. Perhaps it should be that Christ went through the wilderness for us and, though we weren’t fixed by a magic bullet, we were given a promise to one day be free of the fetters of this world, and as a token of that promise, we were given the Holy Spirit, who gives comfort and guidance in the journey.

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Vulnerbility

11 Apr

Tonight at Lifegroup my wife showed us aTED talk from a psychiatrist who spent 6 years studying shame. Her research was astounding. We are simultaneously the most anorexic, overweight, addicted and overmedicated generation of adults in human history, the reason being that our sense of shame is so all encompassing. However, she also spoke about a certain percentile of the population who she referred to as those who live “whole-heartedly.” They aren’t necessarily what we would think of as the most successful people, or the most fill-in-the-blank, although they tend to thrive. The defining quality of these people is a strong sense of belonging, rooted in the belief that they are worthy of love and acceptance. But here’s the twist: nearly all of these “whole-hearted” people, when asked, stated that vulnerability is one of the most important factors in the way they live their lives. Sounds Biblical, right?

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It seems counter-intuitive to think that what is, essentially an outward display of weakness, positively correlates to a life well lived. But as usual, modern day research merely shows that the principles spoken of in the Old and New Testaments have always been sincerely and profoundly true. Psalm 22, from where we get the famous line, “my God, why have you forsaken me?” opens with a wretched king David lamenting the success of his enemies, as well as his own helplessness: “I am a worm, not a man!” (v. 6) Many pastors are quick to point out the undulating streams of worship that flow from his mouth in the same breath, but I noticed something new tonight in this passage. Verse 20 has David crying, “Deliver my soul from the sword, my precious life from the dogs!” 

I’ll be frank. I’ve been going to church since I was a teenager, so when we talk about being honest with God, being raw and real, brutal with how we feel, yet praising Him simultaneously… I get that. But finding the strength–no, the courage–to somehow say “I am a worm,” while saying “my life is precious.” That is something I’m not used to. I didn’t grow up with it, and odds are few of you reading this grew up with it. That’s because the economy of our current culture is based on lament. We go about our lives, using stress or pain as a status symbol. There is something subconscious in us that says our importance comes from the amount of problems we have. Most of us honestly could do something about these problems if we wanted. We could get more sleep, say no to a few more things. But we don’t, because deep down we still buy into that old lie that our worth comes from what we do.

It’s no different within the walls of our churches, either. Within the body of Christ we are silently competing with one another to see who can sleep the least, or expend the most energy on ministry. We glorify those who give, and those who give beyond their human capacity to give, we make into our own Christian celebrities. That is, until this unhealthy lifestyle lands a leader in the middle of a scandal. Then we disown them.

And yet, here was David, a man who defined himself as a worm. At this point in his life, he really was a worm, too. A king stripped of his crown. How embarrassing! But he still believed his life was precious. Because David, moreso than any other figure in the Old Testament looked to God as his justifier. And so as God hung on a cross, He quoted David: “Eloi! Eloi! Lama sabachthani!” Why have you forsaken me? Christ, who was the very essence of life. The being through which all goodness procedes made Himself to be a worm. It levels the playing field, doesn’t it? The One who is precious made Himself like us. So we are precious. Do you see it yet? It’s going to take plenty of vulnerability to get there.

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A Bottle Full of Mercy

9 Apr

In high school, I had a French teacher named Madame El Shaal. She was an Egyptian woman who spoke Arabic as a first language, French as a second, and English as a third. We didn’t like her.

Madame was a heavyset woman of a very lightly olive skin-tone, and she was not well versed in American slang, idiom, sarcasm, intonations, music, or really anything else of which teenagers are typically on the cutting edge. Every day she would come to school with the look of a caged squirrel, hide her face behind her teachers’ edition and read from it. When we were expected to repeat the French vocabulary and conjugations she recited, she would peek her eyes over the top of her book. This was our cue to respond. You could always pick her out of the crowd in the halls because she was the only teacher who not only wore a traditional hijab (head scarf), but nervously made her way down the busy paths of students, communicating only through nods and anxious smiles.

My fellow students and I hated her class at first, mainly because learning a new language (or anything worth while for that matter) while your hormones are raging is difficult. But we eventually found methods to cope with our discontent and those methods exclusively entailed taking advantage of Madame El Shaal. I would often sit with a friend of mine in class and play cards. If she asked us what we were doing, we would simply say, “playing cards.” If she asked us to stop, we would say “okay,” and promptly return to our game. If she told us to go out into the hall, we would say, “okay” and promptly return to our game. If she told us to go to the office, we would say, “okay” and–do what?–promptly return to our game. At times, she would check our homework, which entailed walking briskly from one side of the room to the other. In these cases, I would allow her to check a friend’s homework, then I would take that very homework and returned to my seat. “This is my homework,” I would say, winking and mouthing the words I’m lying to you right now, “It doesn’t belong to anyone else!” She would look at me puzzled and say “…Okay…” the she woud give me a 100 and move on.

But on September 11, 2001 class was very different. Madame didn’t speak. She played a recording and had us copy down the vocab words. She had us do book work silently. She sat at her desk, placed her fingers on her temples and spoke on the phone. She came to school on September 12, 2001 without her hijab on. It was the first time I had ever seen her hair. From that day forward, she became even more anxious than she was before. Obviously terrified to be a Muslim in America, she often seemed preoccupied. She called her family during class and whispered to them in Arabic, covering her mouth to hide the language she spoke. On one occasion she stopped teaching mid-sentence because she saw me playing rock-paper-scissors with a friend, and just starred at me. Her gaze cracked as her eyes welled up in tears and she retreated back to her seat and sobbed for about 10 minutes. It was as if someone had dumped water down my back. I had never seen how ugly my sin was more clearly than on that day. Madame made it partially another year at my highschool before resigning.

Fast-forward 9 years. May of 2010. I was in Leogane, Haiti with a group from my church, attempting to follow up on some relief efforts, as well as plant churches in the primarily Voodoo community. The day had grown long and I was beginning to feel the weight of my own back mount up against me in the hot sun and humid air. Everywhere I had gone, I had been followed by a pack of street kids demanding candy, money, or anything I had on me. One even demanded the shirt off my back. They would point to anything on me and say, “you give me.” This became very taxing on me as I realized that, no matter what I did, the color of my skin was associated with free stuff. And the children’s manners weren’t any better. They followed me for literally an hour, shouting “hey you!” because this was about all they could say in English. Tired and at the end of my rope, I climbed into our team’s van at the end of the day, pushed the kids’ hands away so that I could close the door and buried my face in my hands. It was the closest I could come to getting some alone time. As we drove on through the village, I could tell that our van was being surrounded everywhere we went, until we reached the fabled “Voodoo trees.” At this point the kids fled as a Voodoo priest emerged, shouting at us in Creole and throwing bottles at our van.

I tell these two stories in conjunction to make a point. In Haiti I was tired, confused, and I didn’t know the culture. So when a witchdoctor threw a bottle at me, it felt bigger than just a weirdo throwing trash. It felt dangerous. It felt threatening. I needed to know I was okay. I was a foreigner and I needed a friend. But perhaps the bottle flung from that mad hand was full of the mercy of God, because as I look back on that experience, I can see I wore the same anxious expresion that day as Madame El Shaal wore. Jesus said “love one another, as I have loved you.” (John 13:34) But how easily I forget it. I hope I will find myself capable of remembering the next time I see someone wearing that same anxious look.

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