nakedreligion

I am finishing a sermon series on the Book of Acts I’ve entitled, “Called to be the Church.” I have borrowed this title from a fine book by Rob Wall and Anthony Robinson by the same name. While I have preached an occasional text from the Book of Acts before (Acts 2 always seems to roll around during Pentecost for some reason), I have never spent any extended time preaching Acts. Perhaps I was afraid of the “Signs and Wonders” glasses through which many read Acts in the eighties and nineties? Whatever the case, I regret that I have not done this before now. As I approach my last of fourteen consecutive sermons from the Book of Acts, I am going to miss living with this incredible story of the founding, expansion, and ultimately missional expansion of the church week-in and week-out.

As I look back over my ministry in various churches, I have been been given a glimpse of this dynamic quality of the community of faith “being the church” on rare occasions. I don’t know if this was because I was too busy promoting some program to pay attention to what the Holy Spirit was doing or because there was a deficit of the church actually being the church. I suspect it was a little of both. But for the purposes of my reflection in this piece, imagine with me what the church would actually look like if it overwhelmingly decided it wanted to be the church.

The first characteristic of a church being the church would be a community of ordinary people who place all their eggs in creating opportunities for God to transform people’s lives. From the first page to the last in the Book of Acts, this is what happened in abundance. Regular people. Screwed up people. Selfish people all discovering the power of God’s transforming vision for the kingdom. If the Church wants to be the Church again, we need to put this high on our list of priorities.

The second characteristic of the church being the church doesn’t stop at transformation but recognizes that part of the task of the church is to take transformed people and guide them in the formational practices of Jesus. Back in the eighties we talked about this as discipleship. Whatever we call it, can you imagine what the church would look like if its members engaged in some of the practices of spiritual formation on a routine basis? I get a shiver every time I witness the occasional church member wrestling with the meaning of his or her faith in the midst of some of the mundane experiences of their life. A congregation of transformed people who don’t give attention to the formation of their faith is mere spiritual enthusiasm. But a congregation that is learning to be the church knows that transformation is always followed by formation.

The final characteristic of the church being the church that is evident on every page of the Book of Acts is mission. I’m not talking about sending a proportion of the churches budget to support foreign missionaries through the denominational budget (although there is nothing wrong with this). Instead, I’m thinking about a congregation that sees the the purpose of transformation and formation always resulting in an expanded mission and vision for God’s kingdom. Whether that is having a cup of coffee with a friend who is struggling in their marriage or serving the community through the local community association, mission is an active expression of a transformed life.

Transformation, formation, mission. If the church desires to “be the church”, I have a hunch it includes these three characteristics regardless of what you call it. I want to be part of a community of faith that takes all these seriously. I want to consider deeply what this means for my life alongside those in my congregation that want to do likewise. I want my vision to be over-layed with with a vision of the kingdom that is so expansive and integral to my ordinary life that I wouldn’t know what to do without it. There are many reasons why one might argue that the sooner the contemporary church dies the better off we’ll all be. I am optimistic that if and when the churches we are part of begin to capture a vision of God’s kingdom that exhibits transformation, formation, and mission, we will indeed turn our communities upside-down.

Sometimes I don’t plan my schedule very well. I signed up for a multi-church initiative where many congregations in my community dedicate a single Saturday to serve our community. I heard so much about the value of this experience last year, I wanted to experience it for myself this year. Little did I know when I signed up for Jubilee Service Day that that I would be moving from a temporary living situation to a new home on the same weekend. To complicate things, I didn’t know that I would be in the final stages of recovery from a herniated disk in my back that had laid me out most of the summer.

The Friday the move went without a hitch. After the movers finished delivering our possessions and drove off, I sat down in my new home exhausted and regretting that the next day I would be participating in Jubilee Service Day. The next day as I drove to the gathering place to get my assignment, I secretly wished that my car would break-down so I wouldn’t have to go. I made it there without mishap. As they were handing out assignments for work, I hoped they would give me something simple, easy, and even relaxing. I greeted the teacher along with my wife and two other women who had been assigned to the same classroom. She welcomed us and said, “I’ve got a hard job and and an easy job.” As she said this, one of the women looked at me and said, “I think you’d be the perfect person for the hard job since you’re the man.” (I didn’t not in agreement nod or even think this for those with feminist sensitivities). The teacher pointed to a stack of unopened boxes of books and directed me to open them, remove the contents, and break down the boxes. I smiled with little doubt that God has a sense of humor.

I finished my job efficiently and approached the teacher for another. She handed me eight dozen pencils and an electric pencil sharpener. “The electric pencil sharpener has been acting up. If it dies, there is an old fashioned sharpener over there,” she said. I pushed my first pencil into the sharpener. It whined and died without a whimper. So there I stood sharpening eight dozen pencils less one in an old fashion pencil sharpener. As I stood there pushing one pencil in after another, it occurred to me that children would be learning cursive writing, practicing addition and subtraction with these pencils. And then I began to pray for these students as I pushed each pencil into the sharpener with a new sense of joy and gladness. If anyone asks how my Jubilee Service Day went, I will smile and say, “I sharpened pencils for Jesus.”

A friend of a friend of Kathy Houston (not her real name) approached me as I stood at my locker and said, “Kathy wanted me to tell you that if you invited her to the ninth grade prom, she would say yes.” I tried to hide my look of astonishment because I was new to the dating and dance game and beside, Kathy Houston was the most attractive girl in the ninth grade. As the prom grew closer, I tried to work up my nerve to ask Kathy to the dance. When I saw her standing at her locker alone between classes, I walked up with wobbly knees and leaned against the locker next to hers and said in a macho voice, “So I hear you wanna go?”

She looked at me and smiled and said, “Go where?”

“To the prom.” I said with confidence.

She pulled a book out of her locker, closed it, and looked at me and said, “No” and walked away. She didn’t see me knees buckle as I wonder who was responsible for this cruel joke. Later that day, a friend of a friend of Kathy came up to me and said, “Kathy would like to go to the dance with you, but she wants you to ask like a gentleman.” I approached Kathy one more time and said, “Kathy, would you like to accompany me to the ninth grade prom?” To which she smiled and replied, “yes.”
When we arrived at the Junior High School gym, Kathy excused herself to join her friends in the girls bathroom. I waited and wondered while five minutes became ten, then twenty. I happened to look out on the dance floor and saw Kathy dancing with another gentleman. I was not adept at the rules of dance enough to generate the courage to cut in on my date for the ninth grade prom. When the last song played the lights came up and my dad drove me home alone while Kathy found another way home. I didn’t dance with my date the entire evening.

Twenty years and a life-time of memories had clouded that evening when Kathy was my date at the ninth grade prom. But I had never forgotten the fact that I never danced with her once that evening. She would not likely remember that I had spent earnings from my paper route to purchase her corsage. She did not know that I tried on one tuxedo after another settling on the perfect color– baby blue. After a splendid dinner together, I reached for the check with pride. Eighteen dollars and seventy-one cents later we waited outside the restaurant for my dad to pick us up in our family station wagon and take us to the prom.

After I arrived at my twenty year reunion, I saw Kathy sitting across the room at a table with a number of her friends. I approached her and smiled. “Hi, do you remember me?”

She said, “yes, or course.”

I wondered if her memories were the same as mine as we engaged in the usual small-talk that accompanies reunions. Before the conversation came to a close, I returned to the topic of the ninth grade dance. We laughed about how she was the one who actually initiated our date and declined my first invitation because I had not “asked” her like a gentleman. Finally, I smiled and said, “I’d like to have the dance with you I never had.”
“If you ask, I will speak to my husband and I will dance with you,” she replied.

As the second night of my twentieth High School reunion waned on and I almost forgot about our earlier conversation, Kathy approached me on the edge of the dance floor. She reached out her hand, smiled and said, “Come on, let’s dance.” And so we did. For a few brief moments, I finally danced with the date from my ninth grade prom.

She sent me a note after the reunion. She said I hadn’t changed much because she still had to be the one to initiate our dance. The truth of the matter is that none of us have changed much during the intervening years of our lives. I ran into her recently with my kids at a local restaurant. We greeted one another and introduced our kids to one another. I turned to my kids and said, “This is the woman in that ninth grade prom story that you’ve heard me tell.” My youngest son, interjected, “Yah, you’ve told that story a hundred times.” I suppose I have. And now after all these years, the story of the last dance has an ending until the next time I am reminded of my early dating foibles and I say “have you heard my story about the last dance?”

Someone was recently bragging to me how many times they moved in their life-time. When they were finished, I laughed and began to count the number of places I’ve lived in my life. One. Childhood in Seattle. Two. Vancouver for college. Three. You get the idea. And here I am about to move yet again. Only this time I am only moving around the corner from apartment dwelling to our own home. We are glad for this move because we’ve been living out of our suitcases and the generosity of my congregation for almost a year. It’s time to move. It’s time to settle. It’s time.
When I tape up empty boxes and leave them in my kids rooms, they already know what to do with them without my telling them. We have learned that many hands make the work easier rather than trying to gut it out by ourselves. We have discovered that not everything is worth moving to the new place, so with each move we discard almost as much as we keep. When my kids fill a box, they know to leave it outside their room so that it can be taped and marked. There’s a inevitability that accompanies our moving now. Like robots we pack and unpack without emotion.
I don’t know if there is any virtue to moving a lot except that it reminds one that life on this globe called planet earth is transitory at best. Living lightly is not only a mantra of environmentalists. There is a way in which it can be literally true. A few things in a suitcase. A box of personal items. And that’s enough. I don’t plan on moving again anytime soon, but I fear that I will unknowingly become like everyone else. Before too long my garage will not be able to hold my car for the junk. And from there, i will designate an unused room for all my extra stuff. And finally, I will know I’ve reached the pinnacle of American life when I can say I have a storage unit that I haven’t looked in for years. Then again, the next time someone is bragging about how many times they’ve moved, I need only to hold out my fingers, smile and wonder where God might be leading me and my family next. Now that’s living lightly.

Have you become addicted to “web 2.0″ yet? What is this you ask? This is the latest generation of web-sites that are dedicated to social-networking on a level that we have never seen up until now. There are a variety of sites devoted to various forms of social networking including “MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I happen to be networked in the Facebook domain. I don’t know how it works exactly, but every so often I will receive an e-mail from someone requesting to be my friend. It may be someone I know well who has just signed up with Facebook. It may be someone who I knew years ago and haven’t talked to in years. Sometimes the request comes from someone who I don’t know other than some common acquaintance we share.

Whenever I receive one of these requests, I always face the dilemma of whether or not I want to add another friend to my growing list of “friends.” I wonder what the meaning of friendship really is, when all that is required to be a friend in the context of my social-networking website is the push of the “confirm” button. Sometimes I agree to a new friend without question because we are friends and I’m genuinely interested in keeping up with them. Other time I push the “confirm” button because I would like to have more frequent contact with a long lost friend or new friend. Sometimes I simply push “ignore” because I can’t imagine why this person would want to be connected to my social network.

All this leads me to wonder about the nature of friendship in this new world of social networking. Where once a friend was someone that you knew at some point or another in your life beyond some superficial encounter, now friendship appears to be nothing more than accumulating the largest list of “friends” in a social network like Facebook. Friendship may not be easy to define, but you know it when you see it. Perhaps its time to define friendship with more specificity now that Facebook has redefined the meaning of friendship. I propose the term “real friend.” By this I mean someone who we routinely encounter in the flesh over a cup of coffee or interact with through an annual Christmas card. Whichever the case, it would be tragic if friendship is merely defined by an indiscriminate push of a button to “confirm” or “ignore.” How do you define friendship?

For any die-hard X Files fan, one never tires to the angst ridden Fox Mulder and modernist Dana Scully solving another bizarre case. It has been ten years since the last X Files movie which is plenty long enough for those who stay up late watching X Files re-runs on cable. With a sub-title like “I want to Believe” who could pass up the next episode in the X Files saga.

The movie contains all the familiar dark elements for which it became popular almost twenty years ago. Scully is as attractive as always working as a practicing physician in a Catholic Hospital of all places. Mulder has spent the intervening years holed up in a cabin in the woods cutting out news clippings and minding his own business. When a bizarre disappearance and death takes place in West Virginia, Scully and Mulder are called together to investigate. The sexual tension between Mulder and Scully from the first few seasons is now over as they engage in pillow talk about the vexing character of the current case. As usual, Scully diminishes the possibility that the case is anything other than a bizarre disappearance. Mulder on the other hand, keeps alive the notion that not all is what it seems.

The plot was straightforward and plodding at points. It sometimes felt like an excellent one hour episode that was stretched to movie length. In the end, there is a surprise appearance of one of the long time characters from the television series. The movie comes to a close leaving the audience wondering if Scully finally believes as she happens by a church and goes in and sits down. The movie is good but not great. I still think the conspiracy element in the early years of the television show was the best part of X Files. In the end, the movie will certainly remind the already converted to put X Files the television series higher on their Netflix que. Whether the public will remain interested for the next movie (if there is one in the plan), “I want to believe” but I’m not holding my breathe.

I sat on the lawn listening to seventies pop band Steely Dan at a local winery. It was a warm evening. Good friends. All the memories of that formative time in my life coursing through every bone in my body. In a moment of clarity, I watched middle-aged men and women with graying temples swaying to the music of these aging rockers, thinking to myself, “Look at these people. Don’t they have anything better to do but relive their youth by listening to some over the hill rock band?” Then it occurred to me. I’m one of them.

Seventies music still catches me up short when it comes on the radio while I sit in traffic grumbling about how much time I waste trying to get from here to there. If I want to be productive without distraction, I simply play some Boston, Rolling Stones, or Super Tramp loudly and all is well with the world. While I didn’t embarrass myself by attempting anything that remotely looked like dancing, I occasionally tapped my toe and raised my fist as a sign of universal approval of an amazing drum solo. On the one hand, I am deep denial about being middle-aged along with the rest of middle-aged culture. Yet, sitting in a sea of people who have nothing in common but the music of a particular generation is both invigorating and in a strange way, the best way to grow old.

I suspect that every generation has similar music and experiences that function the same way. I have a suspicion that the re-emergence of aging rock bands who charge way too much money for people to come hear their gravelly voices, find a similar kind of joy in the experience as those for whom they perform. Every time I look in the mirror, the person who looks back may not look like the teenager that I see in my minds eye, but that doesn’t mean I can’t live with the vitality of my youth even to the moment of my last breath. Don’t look for me occupying the rocking chair on the porch at the local retirement community any time soon unless there happens to be a seventies rock band performing on the front lawn. I’ll be the one swaying to the music with my eyes closed and fist in the air.