Wednesday, April 1, 2009

core

I was talking to someone recently who told me about a friend whose dad had been stricken with Alzheimer’s. The dad had been a man of action, but as his abilities faded he found himself bewildered because there was nothing for him to do. Who was he? What was left inside? He had never paid attention to his inner life, so he was losing his sense of himself. And he was becoming a very difficult person to be around.

A couple of weeks ago when Natasha Richardson died very unexpectedly, I saw a replay of a 1998 interview in which she said she thought of herself as an “overweight unattractive teenager.” The world was mourning the loss of a beautiful actress, but they couldn’t see beyond the outer self.

Who am I inside? The great men and women of Christian spirituality urge us to cultivate our inner life. The foundation of Christian spirituality is listening prayer. And at the heart of listening prayer is hearing God say he loves us. I need to hear the Father’s voice, telling me I am his beloved. My inner self is not what I do or have accomplished. At my very core I must know that I am God’s and that he loves me.

Cultivating is a farming metaphor. It takes time and energy to break up the ground, to remove the weeds, to make it hospitable to life. And then it takes time for the plants to grow and to bear fruit. But if I don’t want to end up lacking an inner life, if I want to be characterized by love, joy and peace (the fruit of the Spirit), then there’s no time like the present to start cultivating my inner life.

Monday, March 30, 2009

sermon titles

I don’t put a lot of thought into my sermon titles. Some might accuse me of not putting enough effort into my sermon titles, but what’s the purpose of a sermon title anyway? Jesus didn’t name his sermons nor did Paul.

It seems that sermon titles are a kind of marketing. For churches that have marquees, it’s something to put out in front of the church to attract people to come in. Wherever it appears, it’s meant to entice people to listen. Of course, that’s based on the assumption that people need to be enticed, that we have to offer something in the sermon that the person reading the title will think, “I want/need to hear that.” So the title may be funny or though-provoking.

Marketing itself is based on individualism and consumerism. It’s easy to approach a sermon as if it’s something that I’m selling to people who already have pretty much what they need but if I can entice them they’ll grab one more thing to put into their shopping basket.

Sermons weren’t always seen that way. And marketing is a new phenomenon. Before the advent of modern marketing, one bought what one needed and that was pretty much dictated by what your community said you needed. And there was a time when people went to worship with others because they knew it was important for their spiritual nourishment and they listened to whatever the pastor preached without feeling like they could blow off the sermon if it didn’t appeal to them.

I’m not saying that we need to accept mindlessly what is handed to us by our community. But I’m sure that as individuals we can’t find within us all that we need to judge what is good, true and beautiful in this world. We were designed to live in community. Our knowledge of ourselves and of our world is meant to mediated by others. It’s a messy and time-consuming process, but the point is not merely to get the right answer but to live rightly.

My prayer is that people are listening and reflecting and discussing with me and with each other what’s said in my sermons, whether or not they like the title.

applause

Yesterday I led the worship team and preached. It was a challenging day. All of the kids were with us in worship because it was a 5th Sunday. It was good to have the kids witness the commissioning of someone to go on a mission trip. But I felt the need to inject extra energy into the sermon to keep everyone’s attention. And the sermon went long because we had a skit and object lesson for the kids in the middle of it. On top of that, I felt that I was rushing and there were several things I had planned to say that I had to skip over. And the worship went 10 minutes over even though I had planned on leading only 4 songs, 3 with drums and bass and one solo (just guitar). I had experimented with the first two songs, trying to lead from the electric guitar, but the settings I had tried at home didn’t sound right in the sanctuary and I couldn’t get a sound I liked in the short warm-up rehearsal. I didn’t have much time to think about it after worship because I led an orientation meeting for the hosts and worship leaders for our neighborhood Good Friday services. And then my family went to lunch with some friends who were visiting the Bay Area from SoCal.

I didn’t get to catch my breath until the drive up to Leland House, the residence in San Francisco for people with HIV that we visit each month. I thought about what passage to cover for Bible study. The first Bible study I’d led 2 months ago had 4 participants from the house, the second had just one. I didn’t know what to expect. I got there and found several people sitting outside enjoying the beautiful day on the patio. I sat down, got into the conversation, and then asked if we could have the Bible study out on the patio. I tried to pass out Bibles but no one wanted to read, they just wanted to hear me read to them. I read the parable of the soils from Mark 4 and six of us plus a couple more visitors got into a spirited discussion that ranged from the passage at hand to the truth that is in all religions. (This was NOT an inductive Bible study.) I tried to slip in “nuggets” of evangelistic truth, but found that propositional truth seemed dry. People wanted to talk about what made them able to get up in the morning. They shared about the importance of having gratitude for each day and finding the good in people around them. They had no argument with the fact that God loved them and that sin had messed up the world. They could accept that Christ had said he was the way, but they found it unreasonable that Christians demanded that everyone live a particular way. Right and wrong were self-evident and there was no need to claim ethics as the province of just one religion.

I was an hour late because of my lunch, so the Bible study (that had taken about 15 minutes the previous month) took well over an hour and we didn’t even realize it was already 5:00 and time for dinner. And I hadn’t even touched my guitar, which I usually play for the residents each month. So I decided to play and sing during dinner. I started off tentatively. I hadn’t really thought about it, but the experience of things going badly that morning during the first couple of songs had unnerved me. It took me a few songs to warm up. I noticed one of the residents who had always been appreciative of my music eating by herself, so I started to sing especially for her. After the song was over, she clapped. After the next song one of the guys who’d been part of the Bible study clapped. After the next song he encouraged others to clap. It got to the point where after each song, people would applaud. As people were leaving dinner they said “thank you” to me. I found that I didn’t want to stop playing and singing. Even after everyone had left the dining area I hung around a few moments with not much to do but enjoy the echoes of their thanks.

Several of the songs I’d been singing were worship songs we hadn’t sung in Grace Community’s morning worship for years. But that didn’t matter to the residents. They didn’t know the songs, they just knew that I was sharing my gifts with them, so they were grateful. (We did close with a rousing rendition of “Jesus loves me” that we could all sing together.) It’s easy to become demanding of the best and latest in our worship. As an instrumentalist, I want to try new things and I can become hard on myself and worried about criticism when things don’t sound just right. Yesterday, it took people with HIV, people who knew that being able to get up in the morning is a joy in itself, to help me get back to the heart of worship. “Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise.” Psalm 100:4.