Is anything too wonderful for the LORD?

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In this morning’s sermon, we went through Genesis 18, which recounts Sarah’s and Abraham’s understandable incredulity at God’s promise for them – their own biological child in their old age. By all known factors (Sarah lists off a few!), this was an impossibility. I would’ve laughed too. But God lovingly challenged them to expand their expectations: “Is anything too wonderful* for the LORD to do?”

Is God nudging us the same way? Has He promised what seems impossible? I hope you’ll let Him expand your expectations for something wonderful..

*Most translations use “hard” or “difficult.” I prefer “wonderful” because God isn’t just showing off what He can do, but He’s doing something that inspires delight.

Sermon: Christ’s Compelling Call – Upwards and Outwards Towards Our Deep Gladness And The World’s Deep Hunger – Leigh

(Some background: For the first six months of the year, BLC will focus on the preaching theme, “Upwards and Outwards“. Also, this sermon is based on this week’s liturgical readings: Isaiah 40:21-31; Psalm 147:1-11, 20c; 1 Corinthians 9:16-23 and Mark 1:29-39)

If I were to ask you, “What is your deepest gladness?” What would your answer be? Now, hold that thought.

I am told to be more like Jesus and, based on today’s gospel lesson, I don’t think I’ve lived out a life of being a radical, subversive full-time preacher with a penchant for healing, hanging out with people on the fringes, and dying on the cross at the age of 33.

Yet, as a Christian, it is an undeniable truth that we are called to be like Jesus. Put another way, our journey as Christians – literally, “little Christs” – is a call upwards: towards becoming more and more like Jesus, even today.

Not only that, our call is a call outwards as well – having encountered Jesus, we feel compelled – as Paul did in his letter to the Corinthians – to preach the good news. What does “do everything to spread the Good News and share in its blessings” mean for you, in practice, today?

This week, I went to the Big Bad Wolf Fire Sale and fortuitously picked up a book by Timothy Keller, called “Every Good Endeavor“. I liked what it had to say about integrating faith and work:

“I’d learned that I was supposed to be changed by the gospel of Jesus Christ and therefore be “used by God” in my relationship with others, and maybe even be distinctive in the way I [worked]. Nice concepts, but what did they look like in practice?

One CEO would share that he kept a Bible on his desk and that occasionally someone in the company would ask about it. Another prayed and the company thrived. Many viewed their corporate jobs primarily as a means to make lots of money to give away to charities and organizations they cared about. When I asked pastors and business-people how their faith related to their work, they often answered that a Christian’s primary, if not sole, mission in the workplace was to evangelize those with whom they worked. But most businesspeople would quickly add that evangelism was not one of their gifts. And none of these approaches addressed the issue of how Christians’ faith should affect the way they worked.

Living out my faith in my work seemed relegated to small symbolic gestures, to self-righteous abstinence from certain behaviors, and to political alignments on the top cultural and legal issues of the day.”

Keller then draws on the work of Robert Bellah, a sociologist, who highlighted the need for “…a re-appropriation of the idea of vocation or calling, a return in a new way to the idea of work as a contribution to the good of all and not merely as a means to one’s own advancement,” before going on to explain:

“The Latin word vocare – to call – is at the root of our common word ‘vocation.’… A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it and you do it for them rather than for yourself. And so our work can be a calling only if it is reimagined as a mission of service to something beyond merely our own interests.

To be a Christian in business, then, means much more than just being honest or not sleeping with your coworkers. It even means more than personal evangelism or holding a Bible study at the office. Rather, it means thinking out the implications of the gospel worldview and God’s purposes for your whole work life – and for the [area] under your influence.

So, if we are called to be like Christ (our upward call) and to impact the world around us just like He did (our outward call) – we need to reconsider the fact that our work is more than just a job; it is a vocation.  So where, or how, then are we called?

This brings me to this quote by Frederick Buechner: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Because God has made us the way we are and is continually at work in our lives, we can recognize that our deep gladness – the things that truly give us our deepest joy and sense of fulfillment – are part of His work in us. This includes our sense of fulfillment at work – consider the examples of Eric Liddell, John Coltrane, as well as other members of our faith community.

Integrating our “deep gladness” with the “deep hungers” of the world around us, thus, is where God has called us to. So, where is the deep hunger of the world around you?

And yet, as always, there is good news: God’s call does not take you where His grace does not cover you. Our Isaiah passage is remarkable because of the juxtaposition it offers between the great power of God as Creator and Lord of the Universe, and with the amazing fact that all that power is bequeathed to us:

Have you never heard?
Have you never understood?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of all the earth.
He never grows weak or weary.
No one can measure the depths of his understanding.
He gives power to the weak
and strength to the powerless.
Even youths will become weak and tired,
and young men will fall in exhaustion.
But those who trust in the Lord will find new strength.
They will soar high on wings like eagles.
They will run and not grow weary.
They will walk and not faint.

How this comes together for me stems from God’s call on my life, which I received when I was 16. Since then, I have gone on a lifelong pursuit of that calling – to be an evangelist, to help Good News get told through the power of marketing and communications.

And, so, the challenge now before us is this: Where has God called us to today?

An exercise to help us figure that out was to use the following graph – where, on one side, we list down what we think is our deepest gladness, and, on the other side, we list down where we think God is at work in the hurts of the world around us. Then, we take a good look at where the two meet and see where God brings the two together.

For a final thought, I leave this for consideration:

Think of that cliché that nobody ever gets to the end of their life and wishes they spent more time in the office. It makes good sense, of course, to a point. But here’s a more interesting perspective: At the end of your life, will you wish that you had plunged more of your time, passion, and skills into work environments and work products that helped people to give and receive more love?

Can you see a way to answer “yes” to this question from your current career trajectory?

My sermon slides are available here:

The Doubt Essential To Faith – Lesley Hazleton

I really love this – an agnostic Jew studying Islam’s Prophet Muhammad inspires me in my Christian faith. It is an echo that resonates every time we use a Confessional Prayer in our liturgy that refers to “believers and doubters alike…”

Key takeaways:

And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense that he doubted, because doubt is essential to faith. If this seems a startling idea at first, consider that doubt, as Graham Greene once put it, is the heart of the matter. Abolish all doubt, and what’s left is not faith, but absolute, heartless conviction. You’re certain that you possess the Truth — inevitably offered with an implied uppercase T — and this certainty quickly devolves into dogmatism and righteousness, by which I mean a demonstrative, overweening pride in being so very right, in short, the arrogance of fundamentalism.

and

We have to recognize that real faith has no easy answers. It’s difficult and stubborn. It involves an ongoing struggle, a continual questioning of what we think we know, a wrestling with issues and ideas. It goes hand in hand with doubt, in a never-ending conversation with it, and sometimes in conscious defiance of it.

 

 

What Is A Christian? – Marcus Borg

I was trawling the interwebs when I came across this blog post, asking what – at first – looked like a simple question, “What is a Christian?”

While I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks now, how Christianity isn’t defined by mental assent to a set of doctrinal statements, I had not yet been able to properly articulate what it thus could be.

Then this article came along and really helped me see things in a new light. The parts that really struck me were:

• Of course, the language of “believing” has been part of Christianity from the first century onward. But it didn’t refer primarily to believing the right theological beliefs.  It meant something like the English word “beloving.”  To believe in God and Jesus was to belove God and Jesus.  Namely, it meant to commit one’s self to a relationship of attentiveness and faithfulness.  Commitment and fidelity are the ancient meanings of faith and believingEven the two most frequently heard Christian creeds, the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, reflect this understanding.  They both begin with the Latin word credo, most commonly translated into English as “I believe.”  But the Latin roots of credo mean “I give my heart to.”  Of course, both creeds include a list of central Christian convictions.  But saying the creed does not mean, “I believe the following affirmations to be literally true.”  Rather, it means “I give my heart to God” – and who’s that?  The creator of heaven and earth, of all that is.  “I give my heart to Jesus – and who’s that?  The one we say these things about.
• Christianity is not about “right beliefs.” It is about a change of heart.  It is about the transformation of ourselves at that deep level that shapes our vision (how we see), our commitment (our loyalty, allegiance), and our values (how we live).

The author, Marcus Borg, then goes on to outline what a Christian might instead look like, removed from mere mental assent and into a true change of heart. The center of being Christian this becomes:

• A yearning and passion for God.  About 1600 years ago, Augustine wrote that our hearts are restless until they find their home in God.  Yearning and passion are closely-related, even though the former can mean seeking without yet having found.
• A passion for Jesus.  Jesus is for Christians the decisive revelation of God – the decisive epiphany, disclosure, of the character and passion of God embodied in a human life.  The centrality of Jesus is what makes Christians Christian.  To explain by comparison: Jews find the decisive revelation of God in the Torah, Muslims in the Quran.  Christians find it in Jesus – in a person, not in a book. That is not about superiority, but about definitional difference.  For Christians to affirm that we find it in Jesus does not require denying that God is known elsewhere.  Of course, a book, the Bible, is also revelation for Christians. But for Christians, Jesus trumps the Bible.
• Compassion.  Compassion is the central virtue of a life centered in God as known in Jesus.  When Jesus in a few words summarized theology and ethics, the character of God and how we should live, he said, “Be compassionate as God is compassionate” (Luke 6.36; most English translations read “Be merciful as God is merciful,” but that is misleading given the common modern English meaning of “merciful”).Compassion and love in the Bible often mean the same thing (for example, when Paul names the greatest of the spiritual gifts as “love”), but compassion has a richer metaphorical meaning.  In Hebrew and Aramaic, it is related to the word for “womb.”  God is “womb-like,” giving birth to us, nourishing us, and feels for us (and the whole of creation) as a mother feels for the children of her womb: willing our well-being, and sometimes becoming fierce when our well-being (and the well-being of creation) is threatened.  We are to be compassionate as God is compassionate.  Importantly, compassion is not only a feeling but a doing.  The imperative is not simply to feel compassion but to “be compassionate”-  to act in accord with the feeling.
• A passion for the transformation of this world.  Compassion – love – in the Bible has a social form.  It is about participating in God’s passion for a world of justice and peace.   Together, they are “the dream of God,” God’s dream for what the humanly-constructed worlds of societies and nations and cultures should be like.  Justice is not about punitive or criminal justice, but about the fair distribution of God’s earth, for the earth belongs to God (Psalm 24).  It is about economics: everybody should have enough of the material necessities of life, not simply through charity but as the product of the way the social system is put together.   Peace is about the end of violence and war.

Being Christian is about being captivated by these passions.  They are not beliefs as much as they are convictions and commitments.  That’s what being Christian is about.  It is about the heart and its convictions and commitments.

Amen.

Sermon: The Douchebaggery of a Prophet, the Humble Faith of a Centurion, and Deciding to Follow Jesus

Based on this week’s lectionary readings, yesterday, I shared a message that drew inspiration from Elijah’s confrontation with the prophets of Ba’al and the faith of the Roman Centurion; and how these both illustrate a call for us to be steadfast in our decision to follow Jesus.

And, I got away with using the word “douchebag” in church. 🙂

Here are my slides:

Christianity vs. Churchianity

This post was inspired by my pastor-friend‘s tweet quoting Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr. who apparently said,

“A spiritual person tries less to be godly than to be deeply human.”

I remember when I was in college, we had discussions about what it meant to be a “Christian”, compared to “one who goes to church”. In fact, I remember coming across the derisive portmanteau “Churchianity” to describe those who were culturally/behaviorally Christian – that is: they went to church most Sundays (when they weren’t hungover, sleepy or some such reason), ticked the “Christian” box when describing their religion, and knowing when to say “amen” at the end of a prayer – but exhibited none of the values or qualities one expected of a Christ-follower (humility, graciousness, the fruit of the Spirit, etc.).

It was in the midst of these discussions that I came to this practical conclusion: I would rather raise my children up to be good kids rather than church kids. It was my thinking that, if I raised them up with good values and a strong moral compass – they are more likely to exemplify Christ-likeness rather than worry about how often they pray, whether or not they could memorize Bible verses or how regular their attendance in Sunday School was. I believed that if a person was saved and truly changed within, then it would surely manifest itself outwardly. As a parent, therefore, I wanted my children to be less concerned about external trappings and more concerned about transformation from within.

What do you think?

(I originally wrote some more after this but thought that a) the post was getting too long and b) it was veering off into another topic. Will post again tomorrow)

Driving Faith

By nature, I’m a skeptical and cynical person – and in my faith journey one of my biggest struggle is to remember that God is “good” and that He “cares”. Intellectually, I know He is “loving”, “faithful” and “good” but my image of God sometimes tends to be of Someone who is more interested in my “character building”. Hence, I’m to anticipate a lifetime of struggle, difficulty and hardship (even to death without ever seeing God’s goodness in the land of the living) to become more and more like Jesus.

But, that leaves me sometimes wishing that God would just let off and give me a break! This, of course, lends to a rather bleak understanding of God’s character. Which brings me to my weekend…

I had just arrived at the mountain site of the Church retreat, turned off the car engine and disembarked – when suddenly a loud hissing sound emanated from underneath my engine hood and a thick cloud of steam rushed out. Immediately freaking out a bit, I quickly carried my children to safety before checking in on the engine.

As I looked underneath the hood, my church friend identified the cause of the problem – my radiator had cracked open. I was shocked because the car gave no such indication and I was also concerned because of two things: 1) how in the world was I supposed to get the car back to the city and 2) how much this repair was going to cost.

Eventually, I decided to just enjoy what I could of the Church retreat and resolved to worry about it when it was time to head back. I do remember that, during one of our group sharing sessions, I had specifically mentioned that I always struggle with this difficulty of believing God’s “goodness”. The car – to me – was yet another one of those “build character” moments.

On the last day of the Church retreat, I decided to take a friend’s advice to drive back down to the city and eventually, my mechanic – all the while, keeping a very close watch on the temperature gauge and stopping regularly to top off the radiator.

Of course, feeling rather nervous (especially since I had been warned that I could potentially do more damage to the engine overall if the car overheated too much), I prayed. My typical skepticism, cynicism and understanding of God’s “goodness” led me initially to pray, “God – please let me get back with as minimal problems as possible.” But then, I caught myself (realising that I really was in no the mood to deal with even the slightest problem) and prayed again, “God – please let me get back to the mechanic without any problems at all.”

And so, I began my drive. Thankfully, my family got a lift home from a church friend, while another one volunteered to tail me all the way to my mechanic in case I needed help along the journey. Let me tell you, God answered my prayer fully – I had no problems whatsoever heading back to my mechanic!

• The car temperature was stable throughout the drive. Not only that, the weather was unusually cloudy and cool – with only a brief instance of drizzling (contrary to our typically blazing hot afternoons) throughout the journey. This, no doubt, helped control the car’s radiator temperature.
• As a result of the stable temperature, I only needed to stop once to refill the radiator.
• The car was fully repaired in a day (as opposed to a week as I had originally feared) and did not cost as much as I had feared (it did cost quite a bit, but not as badly as it could have gone)
• My church community were God’s angels – especially for the advice, the ferrying of my family home, and for the one who volunteered to tail my car throughout my journey.
• And my wife very insightfully added – the car only “broke down” once we had safely arrived at our original destination. I can’t imagine what it could have been like if I had to wait by the side of the road with a busted radiator, luggage and young children on an uphill journey!

God was really good to me and I believe He wanted to remind me that He is not just out to throw hurdles and struggles for me to “build character”. God cares – when times are tough, when I am exhausted in the journey, when all I really want is a break – God cares enough that He would protect my car, send angels and be with me throughout my drive.

I remember this quote attributed to C.S. Lewis, “Do not abandon in the dark what you have learned in the light”, so I’m writing this here to remind myself the next time I forget that God is good and He truly does care.