Sunday, April 30, 2006

Vision #4

When God dances, we call Him the Holy Spirit. I went to get a glimpse of Him today, dancing on the backstreets of Nashville.

First, he was at a block party, where Steve Cherico had organized a gathering for the children of Antioch. I heard God speaking Slovak.Then he changed to Spanish. I heard him laughing through a Black kid who was sliding down a plastic incline. I saw God running in the grass with a balloon attached to his arm. I saw him shinning behind the eyes of adult workers who had labored for weeks to make His party possible. He had taken a break from candles and organs and was just having some fun, creating community and spreading some grace.

I saw him again tonight. He was moving through fifty inner city children, dancing for their parents and grandparents. They had been practicing for weeks because Patricia Cross, a quiet lady from our church, has been instructing them how to worship through movement. God was in her too. Years ago, God had asked her to help Pastor Bill Smith with his little church. So, she began offering dance instructions for the children around the church. She kept at it year after year, just being faithful in doing what she could. Tonight, the church was packed with families that she has slowly helped form into a community. They wanted to watch God dance in the feet of their children. They were not disappointed.

They did sacred music. Then gospel. Then Jesus Rock. And in it all, they worshiped the Lord with their feet and with their being.

Trish and I went to the dance with Beverly Robbins, a Christ Church board member who is also our catechist. She wanted us to understand her new assignment -- teaching Catechism to the young dancers and their parents. After the dance recital, one father asked her if she would prepare his daughter for baptism in our church. So if you dance with God, eventually your steps will lead you to His house. Beverly saw this as a confirmation to the call she had received through Patricia Cross.

As I watched the dance, I remembered Patricia Cross. She was a quiet student in our catechism class, fifteen years ago. I remembered how she returned the following year as a counselor. Then she came back one more year. And then another. She was faithful and dependable. Then Bill Smith asked for her help and she didn't hesitate. Year after year, she just did her best for the little inner city church children. Finally, just this month, she got a $50,000 grant to expand her ministry. A few people are now starting to help her. This year the high brow people who put on the Nutcracker downtown wanted her children to dance for them. So her vision is really taking form and touching hearts.

I was thinking tonight about what a great privilege it is to encourage people like Patricia Cross, Steve Cherico, Pastor Bill Smith and Beverly Robbins every Sunday morning. While I have been trying to figure out how to reach those who are hurting, Patricia has been at work already. And before her, the Holy Spirit was at work, brooding over things without form and void, waiting for people like her, Beverly and Steve to join with God in preparing the city for renewal and blessing. Jesus called them the salt of the earth. Tonight, I understood why.

When a church is really a church, Sunday mornings are about encouraging those who have been doing God's work all week. We gather to worship together so we can learn how to dance with God in the streets of our city. First we do it in the safe place -- the sanctuary. Then we go out into the highways and byways.

I want to learn from people like Patricia Cross and Steve Cherico. I want to dance with them because when I dance with them, I am dancing with God.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Vision #2

In hindsight, Pat Gruits preached one of her most impactful messages ever at Christ Church last year. It was Pentecost Sunday and we had chosen her because of her stature and roots in the Pentecostal movement. If anyone could “call the fire down” it would be Pat Gruits. Well, she preached what we expected on Sunday morning and took us on a stroll down Memory Lane. Then she made a strong appeal for us to come back for the night service because she had more to say about the gifts of the Holy Spirit. So, mostly out of respect for her, a good crowd returned for the evening service.

She began that night telling us how God had spoken to her over twenty-five years ago. The word came in the sort of prophetic stirring of the soul that Pentecostals and Charismatics believe to often be God’s voice. She was called that day to build a first class hospital in Haiti. The problem was, she was not a missionary. She spoke no French. She had no medical training. (She faints at the sight of blood.) She was a well-educated, cultured, economically secure woman in Detroit getting well along in years. But God had spoken. So she headed out for Haiti.The world didn’t roll out the red carpet for her new calling. Her husband died on the way to Haiti. The Haitian government was not impressed with her idea. Some Christians kept telling her that this project was a diversion.

The word had come to her but it was only a word inside her own being. That’s where most words stop. Conceiving is a great deal easier than giving birth!

Dorothy Sayers wrote a great book for artists called The Mind of The Maker. It is a reflection on God as Creator. She draws inferences about how human beings create things by considering how God created things. First, she begins with God’s being. Christians believe that God exists as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. She says the Father is the source of being for all that is, visible and invisible. The Son is the word become flesh, the process by which God becomes a part of His own creation. The Holy Spirit is God as received by creation and in relationship back to God.

A Sayers point out that for a novel to exist requires that some person get an idea about plots, characters and so forth. Everything the novel will become will have its source in that author’s inner being. However, at some point the author must pour that idea for his novel through pen and ink. That is a messier process than the idea in its pure and abstract form. Finally, once the novel gets written, it must be offered to others in some concrete form. The idea becomes a book and dwells among us. However, for the process to be complete, the book must be read and absorbed into another mind. This, Sayers claims, is the nature of all creative work.

Sister Pat had conceived an idea from God but no one could see it. She had to actually go to Haiti and struggle with the pain and deprivation of the Haitian people. She could not do her work totally removed from the mess. So she did what she could. She trained pastors. She helped start churches. She opened first aid stations. She poured her being into Haiti.

One day, after twenty years, Haiti received her. The government called her to a meeting where she was introduced to representatives from the World Health Organization. They wanted to build a first class hospital in a rural area if she would help them find doctors and other health workers and would agree to manage it. She had cast her bread upon the waters and after many days it had returned. She had not been just praying and prophesying up in Detroit. She had been busy, incarnating the word. It had become flesh and living in Haiti. Now it was calling to her and working to complete the vision.

As I listened to her sermon, I realized that I needed to broaden my understanding of spiritual gifts. It turns out that inspiration is not a final product but only a raw product. Words, even powerful words, must take on flesh. They must move from abstraction to concrete form. It’s often a real messy process.

Monday, April 24, 2006

Vision #1

Nearly two years ago, I began to send out passionate emails.

At first, they were only a means to share my distress. My wife was in a coma and not expected to live, or at least to regain any kind of normal life. She had had an explosion in her head called a subarachnoid hemorrhage. For all we knew, it had obliterated all her memories, identity and adulthood. She might die. Or, she might live in some form that I would not recognize as the person with whom I had lived and raised a family. I had been suddenly summoned by life to care for someone who might not know me or, for that matter, know herself. Either scenario – death or greatly diminished life – offered raw material for private horror movies that threatened to capture my own brain and take it hostage. I had to find a way to maintain sovereignty over my imagination. Like Trish, I too was in a battle for my brain.

Plato taught that reality consists of two things, form and substance. The "forms," he said, are products of a perfect world. "Substance" is the stuff of our visible and tangible world. Therefore, substance is imperfect and always in the process of decay but without it, form cannot be made visible and functional. Since we live in a world of matter, form must take on substance if it is to be shared and experienced. That’s what my emails did – gave a form to the substance of suffering, fear and faith and allowed me to share it with others.

Whether we agree with Plato or not, we Westerners seem compelled to use this kind of language when trying to describe how we create things. For what is creation if not a process by which we transform thoughts into things? Our imagination is a kind of womb then in which we conceive ideas and from which we may give birth to tangible and intangible products.

As I found out during the summer of 2004, we often use our imagination to frighten ourselves. I discovered that the undisciplined imagination is a monster factory. It can create private horror movies so vivid that our hearts race and our being prepares for imminent death. Even our closest friends may not know that we are terrorizing ourselves with a horror flick that we have written, directed, and produced in the theatre of our private thoughts. If we are reasonably gifted, we can even distribute our internal horror movies to others. It is a type of emotional terrorism to be sure, but we do it all the time. For example, the Internet is a fear-mongering machine that allows neurotic thoughts to mutate and colonize huge masses of people very quickly. In the primitive times before the Internet, we had to rely on rumor to spread such fear and despair!

Well, my wife’s struggle with life and death became an explosion in my own head. I was reeling and rocking from the blast. My thoughts were in disarray. My emotions were threatening to reduce my inner being to a state of anarchy. That’s why the first thing I did each morning during those months was to open the Book of Common Prayer. There is a section in that book called the “daily office.” It offers four readings for each day of the year: a Psalm and selections from the Old Testament, the Epistles and the gospels. I would read all those passages. Then I would write down any particular verse or phrase that stood out to me. On some days I would sing a hymn or a chorus that the scripture reading brought to mind. Only then would I would pray for Trish and for myself, using the words, thoughts and emotions that had emerged from this daily discipline.
For the rest of that day, I would weave every event, thought and emotion into the fabric of my morning prayer. Every doctor’s report and every conversation with friends got pulled into the thought-structure that was holding me together that day. My mind was under martial law. The enemy had come in like a flood but God was raising up a standard against him. It was up to me to cooperate and to submit my inner world to the rule of God.

At night, I would try to condense all the thoughts and emotions of the day into a short reflection, which I emailed to a few friends. To my great surprise, these emails became widely read and distributed. Since then, I have periodically sent other emails to update my friends on Trish’s recovery. (She is whole and completely herself, thank God.) I also wrote about Montelle Hardwick’s suffering and death. The reason for these emails was to give form to my own questions and emotions about these things and to help our community make sense of our loved ones’ struggles in the light of our faith in Christ.

Many have found these emails comforting and helpful. I am glad. That helps give me meaning and purpose. Lately though, I have been thinking about how our minds should function in times of peace when they are not under “martial law.” For surely our faith is not meant as a mere comfort for the stormy seasons of life!

So, as this present season of life has brought increasing joy and excitement, I have found myself wanting to share how faith can move mountains in our world by moving the thoughts in our heads. I want to tell the story about how my spiritual life, which moves forward in jerks and jumps, through inconsistencies and pettiness and through doubt and despair, sometimes gets apprehended by grace. When this happens, at least for a moment, my imagination becomes a colony of heaven. Under God’s government, even a pitifully small piece of truth, goodness or beauty can make the monsters disappear and make life worth the living. Then, things get conceived and begin to make their way from my imagination into life. Form takes on substance and dwells among us. As we behold it, as through in a glass, darkly, we glimpse behind that substance, the form that holds it together – the Word of God, from which all things are made and in whom all things consist.

As it turns out, when human beings create, it is because they have become conduits for God’s Creative Spirit, who inevitably takes on the substance of personal dreams and visions if we will but let go and let God take over.