Andy's Blog: A Personal Word

July 2009 Archive

July 28, 2009

Jul. 28, 2009

What does it mean to be a Christian? I suppose you can get as many answers to that question as there are people! It’s hard to answer it without coming off as sounding smug. Maybe the best definition of a Christian is a follower of Jesus. Discipleship is the new testament word meaning one who follows. The word disciple suggests a journey. The first disciples of Jesus left all to follow him without knowing really who he was or what he was about, but in the following, they learned and were transformed. 

Jesus gives us a hint as to the meaning of discipleship in the great commandment, that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul, strength, and love our neighbors as ourselves. The path of Christian discipleship involves head, heart, and hands. 

• We are invited to know God with our head.
A Christian is one who, through study, reflection, and probing, seeks to know and understand who God is and what God’s will and purpose are for us and the world.

• We are invited to know God with our heart.
Christian faith is not just a set of things we believe. It is not a philosophical system. It is a relationship of love and trust with Christ that engages us and transforms us.  Through the disciplines of prayer and Christian fellowship we come to know Him and not just know about Him.

• We are invited to know God with our hands – to actively love others.
We become the hands of Christ in the world by actively doing good as he went about doing good. 

A fully committed disciple is one who is growing in all three of these areas. Over the summer, we have developed a tool called PATHWAYS that we hope will help each of us assess where we are on our journey, and determine what might be our next step. An important part of PATHWAYS is a simple and quick self-assessment guide. When you complete this self-assessment, only you (the individual) will know the results. As a result of what you discover, there will be suggestions as to your next step in Christian discipleship.

PATHWAYS will be introduced on Sunday, August 9. 

July 21, 2009

Jul. 21, 2009

As we have been looking at the Psalms this summer, their honesty is striking. The Psalmists do not shrink from going to God with anger, fear, lament, pain, loneliness or grief. But almost without exception, each of these cries for help and moves toward expressions of trust and praise. Praise is a central uniting feature of the Psalms. “O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!” (Ps. 95:6)

Why is this? Why is praise and worship so central to scripture? In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer is asked why we worship. He replies, “God is very powerful, but also very insecure, like Barbra Streisand before James Brolin.”

Is this it? Does God need or require our worship? Is God needy or insecure unless he has people groveling at his feet? Does he look for flattery as a condition of relating to us, or does the need lie within us?

Certainly, praise is a natural human response when we encounter something that is good and beautiful. Our team scores a touchdown and what do we do?  We cheer. A musician gives a virtuoso performance, we rise in ovation. When we receive a gift, we say thank you. Whenever we have a “wow” experience, we respond with praise and gratitude. 

In a sense, gratitude and praise answers a need in us. It completes our joy.  Without openness to joy, we become cynical, hopeless, or alienated. As psychologist Peter Shaggers says in the play Equus, “If you don’t worship, you’ll shrink.” Worship helps to make us fully human, alive to life. 

There is a poem that goes like this:
Headsets and 6 AM calls
High heels and open-air mall
Hope cashed in and virtue mocked
Joy forgotten, rusty and docked.

Worship is necessary if we are not to forget joy and cash in our hopes.
This Sunday, we’ll look at Honest to God: Praise. Psalm 47.

July 14, 2009

Jul. 14, 2009

Driving back from the beach, we came to a section of the interstate where the right lane had to merge with the left due to road work. We saw the sign telling us to merge and immediately moved over. But that just cleared the way for some people to speed ahead of us and then try to merge at the last possible moment. I could feel the anger rise in me. How dare they! I will show them. And so I pulled closer to the car in front of me so they couldn’t merge! But then, I caught myself, and thought, “How silly to get angry over something like that!”

Lots of things can make us angry. Nicole, age 9, says that “It’s OK to get angry in certain situations...For example, when your baby sister sits on your new cowboy shirt.”

“You have to get angry when somebody hits you so you can hit him back harder,” says Daniel, age 5.

Anger is a very human emotion. On one level, it serves to mobilize us when we face danger or threats. But, on another level, anger is very disorganizing. It make us say and do things which have destructive consequences.

So what are we to do with anger? Written in a time of exile, after the destruction of Jerusalem, by the Babylonians, Psalm 137 has been called the most celebrated outbreak of anger in the book of Psalms. It is sometimes called the Scandal Psalm because of it’s last verse, “Happy are those who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” Strong stuff. It is not one of those Bible verses we teach our children, or memorize! In fact, we would like to forget it is there. It seems to give credence to the worst in human nature. But it serves to raise important questions. What are we to make of anger? What role, if any, does anger play in our spiritual journey? Is it okay to get angry in certain situations?

As we continue our summer with the Psalms, we will explore Psalm 137 this Sunday. 

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