The Dangerous Duvet

Why are we so obsessed with our own comfort?

I guess in order to be comfortable you have to have some money. Or at least some power. Maybe comfort is just another status symbol?

Or maybe discomfort just sucks. I like my bed. Its not some uber space shuttle bed, but its a heck of a lot more comfy than the floor. But it would be nice to have a sweet down comforter.

I hate being hot. My electric bills are ridiculous because my local climate doesn't allow for much in the way of cold.

I don't like awkward situations, unless I create them on purpose. I usually don't like meeting new people. Its not that I won't like the people, its just that getting to know someone takes effort, and I'm not willing to give up time to do it.

I like lots of square feet in my house. Not because its a status symbol (directly at least) but because it gives me plenty of room to move around.

I hate airplane seats.

I hate gymnasium and stadium bleachers.

I am certainly not calling for any form of extreme asceticism. But I am calling for sacrifice when it benefits others. I am calling for the abandonment of comfort, when our search for comfort oppresses others.

When my love of taco bell oppresses migrant produce workers, its time to abandon my love of double decker taco supremes (why God why?!?).

Again, there is no line. When we start drawing lines is when we get ourselves in trouble. This all must be born out of community. And that isn't easy in a world where technology has created a very weak "global community' that has replaced any sense of true community that still existed.

I sat for hours with a couple that is in my community group. We talked about community, and specifically the churches role in community. I live about half an hour away from them, however, the husband knew that he could call me at 4 o'clock and ask for a ride home from the airport (which I currently live near) and that I would be more than willing to do it. I also knew that when we got home (after stopping at the local pub and grille) that I would be invited in for some more food and good conversation. This couple has opened up their home for our community group every monday night. Not just even that, but they also cook a meal for us (us being up to 25 people sometimes).

They have only been married for maybe 6 months now. That is community, when newlyweds are still willing to spend time with others. Its community when the walls break down, when what we want becomes less important. Its community when love supercedes comfort and convenience.

So how does community happen?

If its intentional, is it really community? Does community just happen on its own?

I think maybe its a little of both. It sure is easy to love people who love us. What about those that don't?

It has something to do with identification, with empathy. I guess we really don't know other people. And now I'm getting all philosophical but really, we don't.

All we can know is our own experiences. So we don't understand other people when we can't link their behavior with some feeling we've had in the past. I can't understand a persons life when the are on crack. I can empathize some because I've had my addictions that I could not/did not control. But I haven't ever lived on the street. I haven't ever really been hungry. My friend explained hunger well yesterday. He said we don't really know hunger, because any hunger we feel, we know we can end with our abundance of food. Real hunger is when our stomach aches, and we know there is no hope of food.

I have never felt that, real hunger.

So how do we identify and empathize with those who aren't like us at all? I guess for me, a huge part of community is sharing life. We share victories and struggles. We share joy and mourning. We share emotions and exeriences. Then we can empathize. So when I say I can't empathize with a homeless guy, I'm saying I haven't spent time with him, I haven't cared about him. I'm saying I am not willing to leave my comfort to love him.

How terrible is that? Yet I say it daily.

I finally understand the scriptures about struggling and giving up your life and about love.

How can I have lived so long, and so poorly with such a backwards view of this?

The Gentleman

My faith community is struggling right now. If your faith community isn't, I suggest you look into it. Struggle is an important part of faith. Without struggle we do not grow.

My community is struggling over love. And we are a community based around love, so I guess that is to be expected. 

We are good at loving some people. Of course its easy to love the suburbanite/post-suburbanite-urbanite, and our church does a pretty good job of loving them. But our facilities are purposefully (i thought) located in an area of town that has a good number of homeless people and people who live alternative lifestyles. Part of the thought process was that churches typically dont reach out to these people. 

So our struggle is the struggle of loving the less lovely. We are early in this discussion but we have already shared some great words.

One of the early great questions in our discussion has been very challenging. The community recently asked a homeless gentleman who is involved in the worlds oldest profession not to come back to the facilities. He was gentle whenever I was around him, but he had a history of theft and drug use at our facilities. He even used aggressive language with one of the staffers once.

This gentleman was removed from our community. How would the community respond if I started using? If I took the tip jar on my way out of the coffee shop? If I used aggressive, demeaning language with one of the baristas? I sincerely doubt I would be asked not to return to the building.

How can we break down the walls the we have built, only “providing Christ” to those who are appealing. Our community has reached out to the alternative lifestylers in our community through the coffee shop, art, and being available for rental.

But then there are the “dregs.”

How can we love the less lovely? How can we love this gentleman?

My faith community would still love me if I became the gentleman. They would spend the time, they would make the extra effort to help me redeem the areas of my life that needed redemption.

So why do we act differently towards the gentleman?

Because my faith community is just what it says it is, a community. A wise deacon, and good friend of mine, said this,

“the first step is humanization, the second step is equalization.  What I mean by that is we take a gentleman like (the gentleman) and we treat him as if he just drove down from (the local affluent suburb) in his SUV.”

We have built walls that we must tear down. When Christ talked about turning the other cheek and giving up the clothes on your back and carrying the roman soldiers pack he wasn’t saying let people walk all over you. He was describing a beautiful and strong revolution. We are not succumbing to other’s wills, we are aligning our will with God’s. And God’s will is for us to love, and love means sacrifice. It means sacrificing safety and comfort. I don’t want someone at the facility to get hurt, but I honestly think I’m willing to sacrifice that safety in order to bring the gentleman into our community.

When does the line of safety become the line of comfort?

When do we build our walls close enough that we may be injured? When do we stop building walls all together?

Community, true community, involves an abandonment of our love of comfort and a genuine risk of our safety.

The Classical Guitarist

His hands moved beautifully: his left dancing like a tarantula on the fretboard, his right picking and strumming intricate patterns without looking like he was working at all.

It was beautiful... the whole situation.

I must have sat there for a good hour while he played. He held his head awkwardly turned to his left, it seemed he was avoiding eye contact with his fans. He was playing on the small stage in the lobby bar. There was usually some sort of jazz/classical musician playing in the evenings and I had the pleasure of seeing him again later in the week.

I couldn't really decide what was so beautiful about it at first. I had imbibed 2 or 3 white russians by the time he closed up shop when it hit me. The music, of course, was enjoyable, but the real beauty lied in the ability of a man to create. The classical guitarist (along with the bartender) created an experience for me that didn't just make me smile, but impacted my soul. I felt like the world was ok for a while, that things were good, right in the midst (and being myself a part of) ridiculous affluence and consumerism.

It was costing my parents multiple thousands of dollars for me to be there. What was I thinking by condoning this? While I spoke openly against it I was willing to taste its sweet fruits. I had to be there for my cousin's wedding right? I mean, it would be rude not to go... right?

At the same time I was happy, content, I had hope, I believed in beauty. Something about his creativity and skill helped me realize that I didn't always have to focus on the darkness. In fact my focus shouldn't be at all on the darkness, or even ridding the world of darkness. My focus should be on creating light. The light itself will eradicate the darkness.

So much of my life for the past year (really all of my life) has been focused on darkness. I think the guitarist's "tarantula hand," yes, something that ridiculous, has brought real and lasting change to my life.

When we create beauty we are beautiful ourselves. Its crazy to think that in the midst of the beauty of the rainforest, and the beauty of hispanic culture I found myself most captivated by something as simple as a hand on a fretboard.

On that day that guitarist was beautiful. It wasn't his strong spanish-looking face, or his awesome facial hair, it was his hand dancing between strings. It was the sounds that he so fluidly coaxed from his collection of wire and wood. It was the fact that he was created in the image of the beautiful creator, and therefore created beauty himself.

The world needs a few more dancing tarantulas, or at least it needs some of us beautiful creators to wake up from our unimaginative sleep and start creating beauty, and use our creativity to redeem the world.

Riviera Maya

I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Playacar, Mexico. My cousin's wedding was beautiful, on the beach, just a touch windy, not too warm, but not cool at all. Made for some great pictures. Unfotunately I forgot my camera, so I didn't take many (just when I could steal my parents camera).

The highlights of the trip (in no particular order) were: spending time with my aging grandparents, seeing my immediate family, chilling with my two male cousin's who were there,
swimming in the ocean, playing basketball in 5 feet of water, interacting with the people who worked at the resort, enjoying the beauty of the jungle, almost getting peed on by a monkey from a tree over my head (I swear it was on purpose!), smoking fine cigars and drinking about ten thousand mojitos (seriously I probably had 20 mojitos in 6 days).

There were two highlights that stood out above the rest.

The first was the trip I convinced my immediate family to go on. We went with a tour guide and some other tourists to the ancient Mayan city of Coba. It was amazing walking through the jungle (having to carefully avoid a certain type of poisonous tree) where the Maya had walked two thousand plus years ago. We saw the ball courts where the winning team had the honor of being killed and then eaten by the spectators (only after the "big" games). It was thought that you got to go to heaven if you won the game and were sacrificed. The captain of the team even became a god! Not a bad deal.

We also climbed the second highest Mayan pyramid which is in Coba.
It rises over 120 feet, well over the level of the jungle, allowing a grand view of the crater lakes and the salt pyramid about a quarter mile away. There was something majestic about being on top of the pyramid. Our guide was half Mayan and taught us a lot about Mayan culture. He explained how the ruling class of the Mayan world (the priests) used their knowledge to convice the common people that they were connected to the Gods and had special powers. They made it appear as if they sun set and rose from the pyramid as the high priest stood on top. They also knew how to use acoustics and from the top of the pyramid voices could be heard for 5 kilometers before the site became overgrown.

As he told us about the deception of the priests and we discussed the barbarism of the culture I couldn't help but draw parallels to the church. First off the connection of cannibalism with the Eucharist is strong. Early Christians were often arrested under charge of cannibalism because of the Eucharist language. Martyrdom was also a huge problem for the early church (though it might not have realized it). Martyrdom was so worshiped that it was almost intentional sometimes, people wanted to be sacrificed for God to prove they loved him and to ensure a good spot in heaven.

I also really feel like our church leadership often holds their position over the heads of their flocks, or at least pretends to be the purveyor of truth and God's word in his region. As a youth minister I was guilty of this, if you needed a question answered, and wanted to know "God's will" then you came to me to ask for it, and I pointed you in the right direction.

We criticize the "barbaric" Mayan culture while we have just taken their physical violence and turned it into other forms of oppression. The church still refuses to touch certain topics, and certain people groups that are somehow a part of the hot issues. Mayan civilizatoin disappeared rapidly, in the cities at least, am I being overly cynical to wonder if the church is on the same road to irrelevance? Or are we already there?

God Goes Bankrupt

Extra, Extra, read all about it!

In shocking news this week God has gone bankrupt after spending all of his resources on a failed media campaign.

In the past 5 years God has been spending billions on a billboard and Christian Radio Station advertising campaign.

If you haven't seen the black billboards with white, witty, sayings attributed to God on them, then you are missing out.

Something about me wants to love this campaign. The Americanized Church is finally responding to the criticisms that it is no fun. Many of the sayings are clever, the campaign reaches people in their cars, which are our last bastions of thought (other than the commode). Most of the sayings refer to a loving God who just wants to be connected with his creation.

What a beautiful vision!

Unfortunately some of them revert to the hellfire and brimstone Christianity that ran so many people away from the church (myself included).

You can see the billboards from the God Speaks campaign here. http://www.godspeaks.com/AboutTheBillboards.asp

In the end though, as much as I would like to like witty billboards, they are just the new millenium's bumper sticker. The churches refusal to get down and dirty and live life with people. Their stretch to "save" as many people as they can before the rapture! The encouragement of "nominal Christianity."

This "let's get you saved and then worry about the rest" mentality has not worked. Because the church never does worry about the rest, or when they do, it all boils down to a simple moral code they have placed upon their members.

When Jesus came, he so passionately dialogued with the Pharisees for this very reason. The Pharisees loved God dearly, they really did, and they thought they were pleasing him by trying to cleanse Israel. And honestly, what did the prophets call for over and over again before the Pharisees came along? The Cleansing of Israel.

So these Pharisees said, "well God's laws need to be followed, and its so important that we are going to extend them even further, so that we never even come close to breaking them." They imposed a moral code on the people that was not of God. Jesus came along, so conveniently at this point in God's love story with his creation and told the Pharisees they had it all wrong. And the Good news he came to share was LOVE. Over and over his messages overflow with love. Where the Pharisees had imposed rules, Jesus said that Love would suffice.

Yes, don't kill your brother, but even more than that, don't even hate him.

That is wh I love the billboards that preach a God in love with his creation. If only the church was willing to be God in that way to the world, and love them personally, in community, rather than just "reach out" to them.

I am involved in a wonderful faith community that even struggles with this very thing.

How do we not "reach out" but rather "bring in."