Worshipping with a Neighborhood

The Brantley family and I went down to the Faubourg Marigny for sushi and Christmas carols on Sunday night. We’re moving down to the Bywater/Marigny neighborhood in June, as Communitas replicates from one community to three. Between now and June, we’re dining out in our new neighborhood once a month, and spending time prayer-walking the streets, experiencing the culture of the neighborhood, and meeting new friends.

The Marigny Neighborhood was hosting their annual tree-lighting and caroling party in Washington Square Park. It’s a very French park – one block, with a wrought-iron fence that locks the park at night. There are trees and benches, and a path around the perimeter. It’s right across the street from the jazz clubs and restaurants of Frenchmen Street. There’s always something going on in or around the park.

After dinner a block down the street, we meandered around the neighborhood, and then joined the celebration. Candles, cookies, and Baileys & Coffee were being passed out. Elderly couples, young families, boomers, hipsters, gutterpunks, and college kids were gathered around a stage, singing along to timeless classics like “Deck the Halls” and “Jingle Bells”. I downloaded a candle-app to my phone, and little Jordan entertained himself by blowing it out whenever he was sure I wasn’t looking.

During “O Come Let Us Adore Him”, I looked over to our right, and saw a gay couple in their fifties – their arms around each other, candles raised, eyes closed – worshipping Jesus. They were just two people out of a couple hundred singing along that night. I wonder how much they, or anyone else at the park, pondered the words in that song? I can sing Christmas carols on cruise-control pretty easily.

As we prepare to move into this neighborhood full of thinkers, artists, musicians and writers, welders, plumbers, teachers and baristas, bartenders and mail carriers, I’m excited. The culture here is open, honest, and inviting. People enjoy gathering for public functions. There is a vibrancy and a joie de vivre here!

The Marigny and Bywater, between them, only boast three active churches. One Baptist, one Lutheran, and one Catholic. There is also a Voodoo Temple and community center, recently built. What’s interesting and exciting to me is the openness to spirituality and conversations about deep things. Jesus-in-a-box doesn’t work here. Honest, authentic relationships of trust and caring are the vehicle for dialogue and journey.

I’m looking forward already to next year’s tree-lighting, when we’ll be going with our neighbors and friends to worship the humble God who was born in a barn and placed in a feeding trough. He’s the God who became a man to share dinner with people who had given up on religion. And He’s the God-Man who was born to humbly love and sacrifice his life for people who religion had given up on.

Can a Sore Back Lead to Sacrifice?

I’m finally getting old… As if the grey (gray) hairs weren’t evidence enough, I did something to mess up my lower back. If you’re old like me, you know the spot – right of the spine, about 3 to 6 inches above where most people’s jeans ride.

Everything physical has been a conscious effort the last week or so. Sitting, laying, standing. I haven’t been able to rest it much, though. I’ve been on my hands and knees, installing hardwood floors at a client’s house. Or hanging a solid-core front-entry door at another client’s house.

I promise I’m not writing this post to complain! My back pain actually has started me thinking about the reality that we all grow old and frail. Our bodies will eventually fall apart on us. Life is short, and it’s fragile.

Before our bodies go, before we blow away in the wind like leaves from the trees in Autumn, what will we do with our time and our bodies? Do we take them for granted? Are we selfish with them? Can we give them away?

That’s not an easy thing to honestly reckon with. To give to someone requires that we give up something. This is what some people call sacrifice. After all, we only have this one body we’re given. And we can’t add more time to our lifespan.

I am approached quite often by people on the street outside some of the cafés I enjoy. They’re looking for cash to get into a shelter for the night, or a cab, or a meal, or a drink. It’s easy to say no, to dismiss them. It’s even easier to give them money. If I’m honest, a lot of the time, giving them money makes me feel better. It takes less effort and time to reach into my wallet for a buck or two than to ask their name and their story. It’s certainly easier than taking them where they need to go, or sharing a meal and a conversation with them.

Maybe the dollar we give to the person on the street is a genuine gift and sacrifice. May it’s just a hypocritical justification for our continued comfort and ease. Are we doing more with our lives than handing out a dollar and a “Good luck, bro!”?

I want to be like Peter and John, when the encounter the crippled man at the gate of the temple. If you read the story in Acts 3, it’s the time of day when faithful Jews go pray at the temple. This guy is sitting at the gate, which tells me he never goes in to pray. When Peter and John see him, they lock eyes with him. They actually STARE at him. That’s pretty counter-intuitive. Most people don’t like to make eye contact with beggars. Try it next time you stop at an intersection or off-ramp where someone’s holding a sign – it’s uncomfortable, isn’t it. Why?

I love that Peter and John don’t just throw him a buck on their way in to pray. Instead, they tell him to get up and walk. They do this in Jesus’ name. And then, maybe the most powerful part of it – they HELP him stand up. Nothing – not invoking Jesus’ name, not giving someone what they need to stand up and walk – is as powerful as combining those things with sacrifice. They stopped what they were doing, and they helped this man up. And they continue to relate and journey with him. He goes with them into the temple! This may be the first time he’s ever made it inside to pray!

It turned out that journeying (as we would call it) with this crippled man actually cost Peter and John. They were imprisoned by the authorities, and from that point on, they were marked men. Why? Because the powerful religious rulers were threatened by them. In the name of Jesus, they healed and loved this man – a man who had been ignored by religious people for over 40 years.

When we, with our fragile bodies that have nothing to offer, sacrifice in the name of Jesus to give dignity and love to our neighbors, it’s powerful. And it’s shaming to those who claim to care, but don’t.

Uncomfortable question: Do you claim to care? Do you really care? Will you spend yourself on the poor? Will you visit the sick, or the prisoner? Will you notice the homeless person on the off-ramp, and become uncomfortable for their sake? Will you love your neighbor? Do you follow Jesus, or are you merely following religion?

Strange Thoughts About Thanksgiving

Key ingredients for a typical Thanksgiving, USA style: Family (nuclear/extended/blended/in-laws/”I have an Uncle Jimmy?!”) + Old Friends + New Friends + Good Wine/Beer + Food (wayyy too much of that) + Football & Parades (optional, mostly meant as background noise for a nap with kids screaming in the background/Uncle Jimmy screaming at the screen, because they really can hear him).

You can customize that equation, insert and delete most variables at will, but there are a couple of essential ingredients to any Thanksgiving – people, and a meal. America isn’t the only culture or civilization to celebrate or to remember over food. Yesterday wasn’t the first time there was an argument at the table over who was the greatest, and it probably won’t be the last, either. Every culture celebrates and remembers around food, and it’s almost always as messy and complicated as the people who are there.

Food is an equalizer. We all have to eat to survive. People bond in moments of liminality, moments when an action must be taken, and there is great risk in the action. Eating is a pretty risky thing to undertake publicly, and a pretty ugly thing to watch. Food and liquid have ample opportunity to leave a mouth, lips smack, tongues retain residue, and breath becomes foul. Bodily noises often accompany a meal.

When we sit down to eat with another person, or with a group of people, it’s an act of vulnerability. We give each other a front row seat to a base act. And I think God designed it to be this way. Why?

Because we are made to be social creatures. We are made to do more than observe. We are made to share. We are made to connect. Some of the best conversations happen around a table, with food in front of us. I had some really great, inspiring conversations yesterday, sitting at a table with three people I know very well, one person I know, and three people whose names are pretty new to me. We laughed and shared stories, we connected over commonalities, and we talked about the blessings in our life – the things we are thankful for. We remembered, and we celebrated! It was beautiful!

There is a Day on the horizon when people from all over the world, who have lived across history, will sit down with each other for a meal to end all meals. We will eat, drink, laugh, cry, remember, and anticipate. I can’t wait for that day. I want to sit around a table with the seven I sat with yesterday, and crowds more, and hear stories – incredible, beautiful stories. I have a feeling that thanksgiving will be a major theme of that meal. We may even have a Turkey Bowl football tournament and enjoy pumpkin pie.

I hope I see you there!

For Ben & Lisa… Living with It

What if you had just married the love of your life, had a million dreams and plans for your future together, and just as you were about to ride off into the perfect sunset – you learned something terrible?

How would you react?

This happened to my friend, Ben. He married Lisa in 2005. Two years later, he learned that cancer had invaded his body. Since then, they’ve had to completely adjust and re-orient their plans around living with it.

A lot of people would not be able to handle something like cancer. I wonder how I’d handle it. I have a hard enough time displaying grit and faith when little things happen to me. Ben and Lisa, I’m sure, have had their dark days and nights of the soul through this, but their faith and joy in the midst of living with it is evident.

Today, they’re facing a new challenge. Ben has been dropped by his insurance, and needs to start raising money to help cover the cost of treatment. People sell houses to pay for cancer treatment. Ben and Lisa don’t own a house. People dip into retirement accounts to pay for cancer treatment. There isn’t much of a retirement account for them to dip into.

The truth is, Ben and Lisa are not just cancer victims – they’re now the victims of some corporate bottom-line. The cost of Ben’s treatment has exceeded acceptable limits, and is now cutting into profit. I’ll save the diatribe about our flawed health insurance system for another blog… Bottom line, they need to raise $86,000.

Here’s where we come in. You, and me. I’m pasting a link here. You’ll click it, and get better details about all this from Ben. There’s a link on his page that I’ve already clicked. It’s the link to contribute to his treatment fund. In case this procedure is too complicated or time-consuming, you can shortcut right to the donation link here. His project number is: 110285

Friends, we all have bills to pay. Most of us have the means to do this – even if money’s tight. This is the beauty of being the Body of Christ – the church. When one suffers, all suffer. Will you suffer with Ben? Skip a latté, have a low-key date this week. That’s hardly suffering. Would you give till it hurts?

For Ben and Lisa, thanks for giving. It might mean a hard month for you and I, but it means a shot at life and health, a chance for them to chase that sunset together into old age.

God Hates Divorce

My parents are divorced. Many of my friends’ parents are divorced. And right now, I’m watching close friends go through a divorce. Living through divorce, and watching it happen to people I love and care about has made me wonder how God feels when something like divorce happens. Wondering about God’s feelings on divorce has made me also ask, what is marriage supposed to be?

I can be a cynical person at times. But I like to be an optimist most of the time. I think that when God created us, he was an optimist. He said it was good. He began to dream dreams for us, and have hopes for us. One of those hopes was to see humans have the kind of relationship with each other that God enjoys within the Trinity. After all, he made us in his image, to reflect him – and what better way for people to reflect God and understand him better than in deepest relationship with each other? Marriage is a mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual bond that really does make two people one flesh. And to rip that apart causes deep pain.

I think that God – as a person – hates divorce, not because it violates some sacrosanct institution, but because a divorce means there is pain. It means there is anger. It means that harsh words have been said, and that horrible things have been done. It means that people are hurting. God hates to see people hurt. God hates to see lives ruined. So God hates divorce.

I used to be religious – I used to see God as this very straightforward, austere, rules-based judge. “Things are right because they are right and I say so. And other things are wrong and you should not do them. If you screw it up, fear me, and try harder to do better.” This view made me think it was all on me to to somehow be “good enough”, and the unfortunate thing is that the Gospel never requires us to be good enough, it just requires us to trust him, follow him, want to be like him, and to really relate to him. This religious idea that I had to be good enough is a pretty jacked-up view, but somehow it was my default. I think that many, if not most Christians really secretly believe this jacked-up perspective. If you look at how many books there are that try to give us methods and easy steps to being more like Jesus, how many sermons tell us that we need to do better.

Our dominant western Christian mindset – whether we’re comfortable with this hard truth or not – is that we achieve relationship with God. We’re a driven culture – productivity and results are what we look for. You can see the toll this has taken on relationships between people. This has also had effect on our relationship with God. True, James says that faith is proven by works, but that doesn’t mean that it is gained by works. John says that they will know we are Christians by our love. That idea is a totally relational concept.

If love is relational, and God is love, then maybe God is relational?

Now, I’m beginning to understand God more as a person, and less as an unapproachable Deity off in the sky, bye and bye. God has emotions, and they’re very real. It makes sense that He feels. We’re made in his image, and we feel. The Gospels are full of Jesus’ emotions – anger, grief, fear, anxiety. All of his emotions are because of relationship. Have you noticed that? He gets angry at the corrupt market in the Temple because it prevents easy and open access to relationship with God. The market said you had to have the right things in order to worship. He weeps because people he loves are weeping, and because his friend has died. He is afraid and anxious the night before his death because he knows that it’s not just physical torture he’s about to experience – it’s a loss of relationship with his Father.

The prophetic scriptures are all about God’s relationship with his people. In it, he says some pretty harsh things. Things that we can easily use to reduce our view of him to just being a judge. But if you look at the words, they’re emotional. God is emotionally charged – he even speaks from emotion.

All of this emotion that God displays isn’t rooted in capriciousness or vindictiveness. It’s not rooted in judgment. It’s rooted in love. He made us because he loves us. Jesus came to experience life as a man, and to die for us, because he loves us. He sent the Holy Spirit to empower and minister to the church because he loves us. And he commands us to love.

As I think about the dozens of people I know that are turned off to Jesus because of how the church has handled things like divorce – some of them, my own family members – it gets to me. I think that the church has really forgotten somewhere along the line that it’s not about religion and institution – it’s about relationship. It’s about love. Relationship is the reason we have institutions. They are meant to protect relationships – not the other way around.

So what am I trying to say? God is love, and out of that love flows his relational emotions – at his core, that is WHO he is. We are relational. We are made for love. If we make following Jesus about more than relationship with a God who loves us and wants us to love him, and love others, then we have religion. And religion hurts God and people.

Divorce is one of those things that causes a lot of pain, and a lot of grief, because it is the death of a relationship. It is the end of love between two people. It’s not what He intended. So, we ought to think long and hard before we go to that as an option. But for those of us who have experienced divorce, how God’s people treat them will affect their idea of what God thinks of them.

My community is loving a family who is in the middle of a painful separation, and divorce looks pretty possible right now. We are his image, we are his representatives. And we have a choice to treat this family with love, with dignity, and to sit with them in the pain – or to judge them for the mess and the pain they sit in. We are in a tricky place. There are some black-and-white issues, but much of their situation is grey. And it is not pretty.

So what should we, the church, do right now? We should hate divorce, grieve it, like God does. Because it is ugly and painful. But, if Jesus can love us and die for us while we still sit in the pigpen of our sin and brokenness, shouldn’t we love this family? Shouldn’t we be there to listen and to grieve, to offer help where we can?

God is relational. God is emotional. And God is redemptive. He loves broken people where they are, and he walks with them. Despite hating sin – hating divorce – he still holds out his hands for relationship. So will we, a church made up of broken, sinful, hurting people, let go of institutions for the sake of institutions, let go of self-righteousness, put aside any arrogance, and simply love people where they are? Will we sacrifice to help heal hurting people? Will we actually look like Jesus when we are confronted with pain and messiness? I hope so.

MattyO

Matt O’Brien and I have been friends a long time. Four years ago, we visited Communitas in New Orleans together, and I returned to Portland knowing my next step. I moved down to NOLA after Thanksgiving that year.

Matt has taken a little longer to arrive, but he’s finally here! After an epic road trip, he pulled up to the house last Saturday night.

He’s about to leave again, though. Matt has just finished seminary in Tacoma, Washington, and has one more training assignment to reach full Chaplaincy in the Army. As he prepares to head out Thursday for South Carolina, we’ll miss him. But December 18 is coming, and after a four-year wait, what’s a couple months?

Boys Will Be Men

I am a man. And I know a lot of men. None of us became men overnight. None of us became men on our own, either. It takes experience to make a man. It takes a community to make a man. It takes a lifetime to make a man.

I’ve got a great story – full of mistakes, insecurity, sin, and stupidity. I’ve experienced much that life has to offer. Some of it was really beautiful. Some of it wasn’t. Along the way, I made some tough decisions, but they were good for me. Somewhere in the last four years, I started making more good decisions than bad. I saw how my decisions were shaping me. As I back up and look at my life so far, I see a turning point four years ago, a fork in the road where a boy decided to turn right and become a man.

Since I was a little boy, I have always wanted to be a man. My favorite movies and stories to this day are stories about men. My idea of a man hasn’t changed much, but I’ve found better words to describe it than a word like “hardcore” or “manly”. “Self-defined” and “non-anxious” are the words I equate to being a man. A man doesn’t have to swing a sword like William Wallace or Maximus, but he is willing to fight, and even die, for what is right. He is willing to sacrifice to protect those that he loves. He is confident in who he is, and doesn’t apologize for that. He is humble, serving and caring for those around himself, and seeking no glory for it. A man calls out the best in others. Others want to be like him. They see his virtue, and they emulate him. There aren’t too many men like that, these days.

I’ve looked up to a lot of men in my life. Many have invested in me. And all of those men have shaped me. There are countless ways today that I reflect their contribution. Not a single one of them, by themselves, could have made me the man I am today. It took all of them, and it will take more along the way to continue to shape me. A man is shaped by a constellation – a community – of other men, who uniquely contribute to who that man is and becomes.

This last weekend, all the men in Communitas took the boys camping. We whittled sticks, we hiked, we fished, we played kickball, we made s’mores. We use weekends like these to invite the boys into manhood, to tell them they have what it takes to be men who are willing to sacrifice, men who lead with humility, men who have awesome potential to play pivotal parts in God’s story. The conversations I got to have, one-on-one, with each of those boys are conversations every boy craves, and every man owes to the boys who look up to him. I’ll have many more conversations with our boys in the coming years. And I get a kick out of watching them try on manhood!

I pray that the man I am today is not the man that I am next year. Or five years from now. Or ten. Or when I die. I want to continue to grow, to be shaped, to be open and teachable. To learn from the men who have gone before me.

I pray for the boys in Communitas, that we would be the men who empower them to also be men. That we would strengthen them more than we wound them. That we would have the privilege of watching them one day making men out of boys.

And I pray for the boys out there, that the men in their lives – their fathers, their teachers, their youth leaders, whoever – will invest in them, earn the right to be heard, and speak into their lives.

If we men would be men, and do it not just for us, but for our communities, our families, and our sons, then boys will become men.

If you don’t have kids yet, there are plenty of fatherless boys and girls out there. Go volunteer at your local elementary, middle or high school. Start hanging out with the youth group, and look for the kids on the fringe, they could use some love. Or, go with an organization or formal program if that’s your thing. Check out The Mentoring Project, Big Brother/Big Sister.

Or you could just get to know your neighbors.