Heated Discussions

The Death of American Innovation?

With the passing of Apple founder Steve Jobs, one cannot help but wonder is it is also the passing of an era.  The spirit of American Ingenuity  begins with Ben Franklin, passes through Edison's Menlo Park laboratories and the garage of Wosniak and Jobs.  In the midst of our American economic crisis and debts to other nations, Jobs' passing reminds us that something even larger may be dying.  We Americans think of ourselves as inventors and innovators, and with good historical reason.  Over the past day, our media commentators and social media friends have all rightly espoused the genius of Steve Jobs and Apple.  Yet we are left to wonder if his influence and success were the last dying gasps of that American spirit of innovation.  The Onion ponders this humorously, and perhaps offensively to some,  but there is stinging truth behind the satire.

If we ask where the Steve Jobs of the future will come from, we fear the answer will be, "not here".  There is an understandable frustration of emerging generations with the economy, corporations and government.  Hearing their concerns, it is valid to ask if there even is the desire among younger generations to be the next Jobs, or dream up the next iPad.  

Steve Jobs was heavily influenced by a counterculture, and became a countercultural icon himself.  Ironically, he achieved this status through living out the narrative of American Innovation, creating and leading a capitalist success story.  But he did so in unconventional and countercultural ways.  

Is his story the last of its kind?  Do upcoming generations even consider such an approach valid?  What do you think, did the spirit of American Ingenuity pass away with Steve Jobs?

A New Kind of Memorial

Across the world, people are doing a lot of remembering this morning.  Nowhere is this more evident than at Ground Zero where today, after much strife and waiting, family members are gathering around a new 9/11 Memorial.  Over the past three years, I have had the privilege to produce and edit a series of videos for the 9/11 Memorial and Museum entitled “9/11 The World Before and After”. In these videos we’ve done in-depth interviews with everyone from architects, counterterrorism experts, professors of history and religion, to those who were in the White House that day.This project has been both emotional and educational for me.  Emotional because of the subject and the painful memories and images it recalls.  Educational because, unbeknownst to me, memorials and the process of memorialization have become their own field of academic study.

Lately, my exposure to this field of study has got me wondering about the connection between how we remember the tragic events of recent history such as 9/11, the Holocaust, or Hiroshima and how we remember the death of Jesus.  Furthermore, I have been wondering about how the ways in which we remember Jesus affect how we remember and make it through the bad events in our own lives.

Let’s start with historical memorials.  Although humans have built memorials for centuries, how we build those memorials has changed in the past few decades.    In the past, memorials to events such as wars were built as symbols of victory.  They celebrated the triumph of governments and empires, but rarely mentioned civilians or portrayed those memorialized as victims.  Also memorials were usually literal depictions of historical events or objects, a general on horseback or a cannon.  It had a specific meaning, it told the official story or what “we all believed” about an event.  It was assumed that what that event meant when the memorial was designed, would remain unchanged for the future. Furthermore, memorials were static representations to be observed.  One walked up to something like statue, looked at it, maybe said a prayer and that was it.  Rarely did such memorials cause a transformation in the visitor or change their perception about the event.  For all intents and purposes, memorials were static official monuments that were not open to interpretation.

These memorials were usually well-meaning, but were the product of their times.  If one visits just say, the Lincoln Memorial (which by the way was not built until sixty years after his death), it is quite impressive.  However, one would have a very different experience if one were to walk a few hundred yards away and visit the Vietnam War Memorial.

All Will Be Well - by Bob Scott

It’s a pleasure to be back. I worshipped at Vision just about every Sunday since Don and Pam founded it, until last fall when my job started requiring me to be in New York on Sundays. I direct Christian education ministries for Trinity Church on Wall Street. I try to bring to my work there the spirit of Vision, because part of what’s special about Trinity is that it has more than three hundred years of tradition, and part of what’s special about Vision is that we’re about to turn 10.

A few years ago I attended a retreat for Trinity. At one point we were paired off and asked to share our answers to the question: What is your earliest memory of God? I don’t know about you, but I usually start out a little uncomfortable in these sharing sessions. I’m sure everybody will say something amazing and I’ll say, “ummm….” And sure enough, my partner was a British priest who talked about being three years old and playing with items on an altar and knowing that she’d be ordained someday. I felt fine, though, because as soon as I heard the question, I knew what my answer was.

In fact it may be my earliest memory of any kind. I was two or three, and I was really mad about something. I threw a tantrum, crying and stomping. I ran and hid under my bed and muttered to myself how awful my mother was and how much she hated me. Finally, when I ran out of steam, I looked out from under the bed to see that she had been sitting quietly the whole time in the rocking chair, holding a glass of milk and smiling. She wasn’t angry at all, just patiently waiting until I was ready to climb into her lap to be comforted.

I call this a memory of God because it’s what I think of when I hear, “God is love.” That’s probably one of the most quoted lines in the Bible, and it’s a wonderful message. But do you ever wonder, if it’s true, why awful things happen in our lives? Does God’s love come and go? And what about the awful things I do … on rare occasions? Does God love those?

Friends Without Benefits

We stink at friendships.  I know this because I hear all the time how unsatisfied people are with their friendships.  Although they might not put it so bluntly, I hear it expressed beneath the words they say. 

Take the life any teenage girl.  She may have a group of friends whom she texts all day and night.  On the surface, it may seem that these girls are a close-knit community of friends.  After all, whenever they see one another, their voices go up in pitch an octave.  They squeal and hug each other.  There are hundreds heart-shaped emoticons getting posted and texted.  Yet this giddy group of young women are masters of gossip, back-stabbing, ganging up on and excluding one girl.  They conveniently forget to invite this girl to a party or have inside jokes and glances that they exchange abut her amongst themselves.  But if you ask them, they will claim this girl is their “best friend”. 

When these girls grow up and become adults, they will basically do the same crap all over again.  The only difference is they will do it while having bigger houses and more money. All this dysfunction will be hidden under the label of friendship.  It makes one wonder if the word has any meaning anymore.

Men don’t fare much better.  Growing up, we play the same games of bullying and exclusion.  We mock the boy who is in any way different, or sit silently while others do. For a teenage boy, getting the laughs of a group of guys often trumps any commitment to a friendship.  We the price for ignoring friendship when we reach adulthood.

When we watch TV, we see beer commercials, sitcoms and dramas where guys all hang out with their “buddies” on a regular basis.  These buddies somehow find the time to everything together.  They go camping, kayaking, and skydiving on weekends.  They have a favorite pub where they all hang out on a weekly basis and alternate between arguing about sports and sharing their most intimate problems with one another.  Although we are constantly bombarded with these scenarios, few men I know would say it is an accurate depiction of their life.  We may secretly long for a “nights out with the guys” but for many men, there no guys to go with and even fewer nights available.  Although many men may long for them, we have no “buddies”, but would settle for friends.

We stink at friendship.  Along comes Jesus and says, “I no longer call you servants, but friends.”  Great.  We can barely form healthy friendships with the people who live across the street and now we’re supposed to be friends with Second Person of the Trinity?  How are we supposed to do that?  If we approached friendship with Jesus the same way we approach some of our human friendships, the relationship would consist of men rock climbing with Jesus and not speaking to one another, and women getting together with him to dish about how all the other Messiahs are getting fat and coloring their hair.

We stink at friendship and, if left to our old patterns, we will probably stink at friendship with Jesus too.  Not only that, our shortcomings in human friendship will also color how we perceive Jesus’ friendship with us.  If we allow that happen, it would be a huge loss to the richness of our lives.  So how can we be friends with Jesus?  With all our distorted images of friendship, what does the phrase even mean?

The Strange Change Machine

In the summer of 1967, I had a life-transforming experience.  I was in a department store with my mother and grandmother and, as usual, they let me wander off to the toy section alone (something one would never allow a five year old to do today).  It was while walking up and down the aisles, searching each new toy on the shelf, that I came across the most amazing thing I had ever seen in my life, Mattel’s Strange Change Machine. 

It was a device that would grow strange prehistoric creatures from tiny “time capsules”. I stared at it for fifteen minutes mesmerized by the picture on the box.  It depicted a T-Rex growing in this magical time chamber.  Even though the box was only about two feet cubed, I envisioned that this device was somehow the size of our house.  I could put it in the backyard, I thought, and grow a full-sized T-Rex.  We didn’t have any pets at the time, so I was determined that, if I couldn’t have a triceratops, I was going to have a T-Rex.  When my mother came to gather me from the toy department, I begged for the Strange Change Machine.  “Maybe for your birthday,” she said.  I was disappointed, but since my birthday was only a few weeks away, I dealt with it.

Sure enough, my birthday rolled around. I unwrapped my present and there it was - Mattel’s Strange Change Machine!  I stared at the picture again, there was that giant time machine and the T-Rex I was going to have in my backyard.  Needless to say, when I opened the box, I found something quite different.

No house-sized time chamber.  No real T-Rex.  Just a hard plastic tile that you heated up, and made an awful smell that caused my father to search the house for a hidden electrical fire (If you had Creepy Crawlers or an EZ Bake Oven you know what I’m talking about).  It expanded into a two-inch dinosaur that burned my fingers when I picked it up.  This class action lawsuit waiting to happen had a deep effect on me.

Since then, I am always amazed when I buy a product and it actually does what it claims.  Take pain relievers, for instance.  When I was a kid suffering from severe earaches, the only pain relief available was St Joseph’s Aspirin for Children.  I came in tiny chewable orange flavored pills and basically did nothing.  So I am pleasantly surprised when, as an adult, I take ibuprofen for a headache and the pain actually goes away.  The product actually produced results.

I discovered the same thing about exercise and diet.    It was something I always wanted to do since my teen years but was always disappointed with the results.  Now in hindsight, I realize that my disappointment was my own fault and stemmed from not sticking with it.  For a week, I would work out or cut out junk food food, stop, and then complain how it didn’t do any good.  Several years ago, I decided to begin exercising, eating right, and sticking with it.  I bought some exercise DVD’s and, much to my surprise, I started seeing results.  I lost weight, had more energy and felt better.  Imagine that, I thought, unlike the Strange Change Machine of my childhood, this product actually exceeded my expectations.

A few weeks into my exercise regimen, a nagging and seemingly unrelated thought kept creeping into my mind.  Why isn’t my experience with Jesus like my experience with exercise?  If I were completely honest, my experience with Jesus, church and God  was often more like my experience with the Strange Change Machine ending in unmet expectations.  I thought following the path of Jesus would lead to me being happier, more secure and more certain about God.  Looking back, following Jesus had often provided underwhelming results; conflict, insecurity and uncertainty.  It was the melted plastic T-Rex all over again.  Why wasn’t following Jesus like exercise?  After all, if you work out and eat right, and actually stay with it, you will lose weight and get in better shape.  Why couldn’t Jesus deliver guaranteed results like that?

The Dude Abides

Summer is well underway, the season of swimming, bored kids and most importantly - vacation.  Vacations are wonderful except for the one troubling reality built into each one of them - they end.  I bet my even mentioning the end of vacation brings a bit of a sinking feeling inside you.  Leaving a place, such as a beach house, is a sad thing.  Those feelings come to head on the last night of vacation. When that time comes to pack up and go home, we wish we could stay a little longer. 

In many ways, the last night Jesus spent with his disciples was like the last night of vacation.  I don’t mean to trivialize it, but to me the evening had that feel to it.  In particular, John’s Gospel recounts the story in such a way, that we feel the disciples longing to stay with Jesus and for Jesus to stay with them.  Thomas wants to know the way to where Jesus is going.  If they can follow him, they can be with him. 

Rather than leave with directions on how to find him, Jesus gives them a metaphor.  As we heard last week, Jesus tells them that he is the vine and the disciples are the branches.  That organic image of the people of God has huge implications for the church.  It means we are more organism than organization and that we grow with Jesus to new and dangerous places, causing the human structures of this world to crumble. As we saw, in a vine, it is difficult to distinguish between the vine and the branches and it should be difficult to distinguish between Jesus and us.  We want to be such faithful followers that when people look at us, or our church, they see Jesus.  

Creeping Jesus

It’s now July and graduation season is over.  For most college graduates, it’s now job-hunting season (at least that’s what their parents hope). In my conversations with graduates, they describe a a variety of employment goals.  Some seek security and an employer that has a clear path to promotion.  Some seek self-fulfillment and meaningful creative work.  However, the holy grail of first jobs, for both graduates and their parents is to find an newly starting organization where they can “get in on the ground floor”.  Such an opportunity conjures up fantasies of owning stock that will split ten times and lead to a windfall of profit when the company offers it IPO.  Being present at an organization’s start is often portrayed as surefire path to wealth and early retirement.

The reality, of course, is that starting an organization, usually entails hard work, and mind-numbing boring details.  If you’ve ever been part a group when it organizes, whether its a PTA, a photography club, or a company, you know all the things that need to be done.  Paperwork needs to be filed.  Officers need to be elected.  By-laws need to be written and adopted.  Rules and policies need to be put in place.  Behind it all is the unspoken belief that if the group can just get those things right, the organization is sure to thrive.  If we can just create the perfect by-laws, put the perfect people in charge and have rules for every contingency, our success will be assured.  If we have the right structure, we think we have the right outcome.

So isn’t interesting that when God decided to initiate the group that would bring the greatest transformation in human history, tha is the jesus movement, God did none of that.  On the final night of Jesus’ earthly life, in his farewell discourse to his closer followers, as he passes the torch to them, Jesus does none of what we do when we start an organization.  He gives no by-laws and elects no officers.  He doesn’t create a structure.  He doesn’t even speak of an organization.  Instead he speaks of an organism - specifically a vine.

“I am the true vine, “ Jesus says, “ and you all are the branches.”

That’s it?  What kind of business plan is that?  In reality, it was more powerful than any org chart. 

How Not To Share Your Faith

In the movie “Saved”, there’s a hysterical scene where a group of born-again Christian teenage girls try to kidnap their wayward friend and bring her back into their fold.  One literally throws a Bible at her and declares that she is “filled with the love of Christ.”  Although it would be easy to dismiss such scenes as over-the-top satire, sadly they are painfully close to real life.  In my tenure as pastor of Vision, I have met people who have been struck by Bibles and also those who have done the striking.  In both cases, the persons involved are now disillusioned and are now seeking something better, a better way to hear about God and a better way to speak about God.

Bad experiences with evangelism, both as perpetrators and as targets, have left many of us willing to leave the whole concept behind.  Indeed, for the past few decades, much of mainline protestantism has done just that.   Now with the decline and even demise of these denominations looming on the horizon, there is renewed interest in evangelism and church growth.  

It’s not just more liberal denominations who have been willing to leave evangelism behind, many of us have neglected it on a personal level.  Although we think of ourselves as followers of Jesus, people who are willing to put even the most challenging of Jesus’ teachings into practice, we are wary about practicing one of his final commands - “Go and make disciples.”  It just seems so - preachy.

It is tempting to note how much the world has changed in the two thousand years since Jesus.  Some of the ways Christians have spread the news of Christ to the world are simply no longer acceptable.  We can no longer spread the Gospel acting as privileged white westerners who condescendingly invade the developing world and destroy indigenous cultures.  We can no longer spread the message of Prince of Peace using violent images and the language of conquest.  We can no longer invite people to follow Jesus by shaming them, condemning them or manipulating them.  If we agree that this is the case, what then can we do?  Is there some way to invite people into the fullness of life that Christ provides?  Can the sacred stories of the early Jesus movement provide us any examples?  Fortunately, they can.

The Book of Acts tells us a story of a time when the apostle Paul preached in a context much like our own.  This story provides us with some guidelines about how we can tell people about Jesus in our time.  This story is so different from how Christians usually approach evangelism, that it does so by telling us what not to do.  I share these not as some magical step-by-step technique, but as some principles that can help us reform how we speak about Jesus to others.

First, don’t separate yourself from the world.  

Paul was on a sort of layover in Athens, waiting for his friends to return so they could continue their missionary journey together.  While waiting he immersed himself in the city and its intellectual culture.  This was not some sort of “friendship evangelism” gimmick for Paul.  It wasn’t a sales strategy.  He was genuinely intellectually curious wanted to engage with the leading philosophies of his day.  Paul spends time in conversation with Epicureans and Stoics, and even goes so far as to stand up and speak in the Areopagus, the philosophical marketplace that city.

Athens was a city of diverse cultures and ideas. It was much like our own culture today.  Christianity is no longer the only game in town for people.  People have a wide variety of spiritual choices and we need to invite them to follow Jesus for a reason other than, “you should or else God will be mad at you.”  Rather than view the surrounding cultural landscape as a threat from which we need to be protected, we need to be like Paul and view it as an opportunity to connect with more diverse community.

Second, don’t condemn people.

Paul spent a lot of time in Athens encountering statues of many Greek gods.  Clearly, it wasn’t his thing.  But rather than respond by standing up and preaching a sermon of anger and condemnation, Paul starts with “People of Athens, I can see you are very religious people.”  He has the wisdom to spot their spiritual yearnings and build on what they all have in common.  That was not easy for Paul, I’m sure and it won’t be easy for all of us.

A few years ago, a visitor to Vision told me he “wasn’t sure how he felt about the fact that our band plays secular songs.”  I have learned that “I’m not sure how I feel about” is Christian-speak for “I don’t like.” Ironically, this person was a rock musician who played in a secular band.  In their view, their Christianity was something that needed to be compartmentalized from other areas of their life and not integrated into it.  Paul teaches us to look for the Spirit already at work in the culture.  When I hear a song like U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” I don’t wag my finger at them and say, “Almost, but not quite guys.  When you write a song called "I Finally Found What I’m Looking For In Jesus', then we can sing it in church.”  Instead I see the longings for God in our popular culture that often describes itself as “spiritual but not religious.”  That’s not an excuse to dismiss or condemn the world around us, it’s an invitation and opportunity to engage it.

Third, don’t quote the Bible.

Usually Paul speaks to an audience of fellow Jews.  When he does, he freely quotes the Hebrew Bible, its stories and imagery.  In Athens, such stories would be useless.  Instead, Paul talks about a statue he saw dedicated to an unknown God, and helps the Athenians to see that the God they are already acknowledging and searching for is the God Paul knows through the pages of his Bible.  He does so not by quoting Moses or Isaiah to them, but by quoting their own philosophers.  Interestingly the line “In Him we live and move and have our being” is a line by a Greek philosopher, not Paul.

Many church websites have a drop-down menu of “What We Believe”.  In many cases each belief named has a Bible citation listed beside it.  We believe in the Bible (1 Thes. 3:16).  Do people even know that’s an abbreviation for Thessalonians, let alone that Thessalonians is a book in the Bible?  Why should they even care? Clearly such web pages are preaching to the choir and aimed at getting people from other churches.  Our calling is not to move people from one church to another.  It is to invite new disciples into our communities of faith.

Although the Bible is authoritative to those of us who follow Jesus, merely telling someone “The Bible says” is irrelevant.  They may well reply. “Really, the Bible says that?  So what.  Eckhart Tolle says this.”  Sure, we want people to come to know the stories of the Bible and find their own place in its narrative, but merely citing it as an authority doesn’t cut it anymore.

Hearing these guidelines may bother some of you.  You may protest, “that doesn’t sound like evangelism to me.  It doesn’t even sound like you’re talking about Christianity.”  But hold on.  There’s another principle of evangelism Paul teaches us and sounds almost contradictory to the other three.

Fourth, don’t water down the message.

Although Paul speaks intellectually and respectfully to an audience of diverse beliefs, he never disguises his own.  His message is not the least common denominator platitude of much interfaith dialogue.  Unlike the religions of his day and the generic spirituality of ours, Paul doesn’t reduce his message to, “You know guys, all our religions teach pretty much the same thing.”  Not only would that degrade Paul’s beliefs.  It would degrade the belief’s of his audience as well.  Although it sure beats killing one another over religion, reducing the dialogue to “we’re all pretty much the same so let’s just agree to be nice to people” is not much better.

Paul doesn’t wimp out here.  He doesn’t, as many people of faith on Facebook do, just post a controversial article and add a non-committal comment like “This is interesting.”  He tells the Athenians that this unknown God, the Creator is now commanding that everyone repent, that is turn toward this God because there will come a time when all of us will be held accountable by a man this God raised from the dead.  Wow, repentance, judgement and resurrection - three of those particular characteristics of Christianity.  Paul doesn’t back away from the particularity of his faith, he embraces it as passionately as he engages the culture of Athens.

When Vision began ten years ago, I would often invite people to come and check us out.  Mistakenly, I would always describe us in terms of what we didn’t believe and what we weren’t.  I thought that would be appealing in a community that was often searching for new forms of spirituality. Slowly I began to realize that people were not seeking something non-specific, they were seeking something very particular.  Not particular on the sense of rigid and inflexible.  Not  particular in the sense of claiming absolute truth and certainty.  But particular in terms of believing whole-heartedly in something.  In a notoriously fickle and uncommitted culture, I discovered that many people are just looking for something to grab on to and for something to grab them.

As a church, we have been called to invite people into a relationship with God so that the Spirit would transform them into students of Jesus.  We believe that it would be better for people personally, as well as for the whole world, if more people followed the transformational path of Jesus Christ.  Through the story of Paul in Athens, God teaches us that that is still possible today.  We can do it with people individually and we can do it as a church.

Sometimes knowing what not to do, makes it easier to do what we are called to do.

 

 

Do You Love Me?

“And now, I just have so much love for the Lord,” said the woman sitting across from in the seminary cafeteria.  We were sharing each other’s biographies and that’s how hers ended.

“That’s great,” I said kind of half-heartedly.  Really, I was just being polite.  Her comment didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.  At that point in my life, I just wouldn’t express my journey with Jesus with such emotional enthusiasm.  What did that mean, anyway?  Loving the Lord?

Do you love Jesus?  Some of you might answer, “Yes”.  Many of you might give that answer out of a sense of obligation.  It is what you’re supposed to say in church.  Yet inside you wonder what loving Jesus actually means.  It can be a strange and difficult concept when you really think about it.  Where does one go to love this Jesus and what does one do when one gets there?  No offense to those of other sexual orientations, but it’s a particularly difficult concept for many heterosexual men.  After all, the church often uses the language to describe a relationship with Jesus that borders on that of romantic love.  We sing about how beautiful he is, his tender love, how we’re going to give it up for him.  Face it, it can all be a little - well, weird.

Maybe you once were like the woman I met in the seminary cafeteria.  You felt a passionate love for Jesus at one time on your life, but now it’s difficult to feel anything for him. Maybe you have no difficulty at all loving Jesus and exclaiming it fervently.  Yet you know that one day life may throw you a curve, and you worry that love will die.  Is there anything to loving Jesus beyond just our feelings?

How Do You Keep Preaching From Being An Ego Trip? Part III

Today, we conclude my series on preaching and ego with advice from two theological heavyweights:

Remember the Johnny Carson Principle – Carson was the master of standup comedy and late night talk.  He could have easily used his talents to overshadow his guests.  However, his guests and critics always praised him for his gift of letting his guests shine.  When someone appeared on the Tonight Show, Johnny let them be the star.  Share the spotlight with your congregation.  Share their stories, not yours.  Let them lead worship and preach.  Replace your sermon with a real two-way conversation.  Sure, there will be some for whom, no matter how much you give them the spotlight they always want more.  But let them be the attention hog, not you.

Remember the Dennis Miller Principle – On his old HBO show, Miller would end his overconfident rants with the words, “That’s just my opinion.  I may be wrong.”    I am sometimes tempted to end every one of my sermons with those words.  If not speaking it aloud, perhaps we should all at least hold that attitude as we preach.

Admittedly, I haven’t always followed my own advice.  However, I have discovered that the more I can keep myself and my own ego out of my sermons, the more room there is for God.  

In what ways have you experienced, as preacher or listener, less ego during a sermon?