What is our Why? Part 2

 

In my last post I started with the concept from Simon Sinek’s book Start with Why, which argues that if you want people to respond to what you are doing you have to have a clear concept of why you are doing it.

If you recall, he also said that if you want to find your Why, one of the best ways to do it is to look back over your life and see what themes and tendencies keep surfacing. That will give you insight into Who you are which will give you clues into Why you are.

Last post I also went through a quick search of my life as an example to figure out my Who and Why.

But what about 2^nd Street? People each have a Who and a Why, and so do groups, organizations and churches.

Let’s look back at 2^nd Street and see if we can figure anything out.

I wasn’t around when 2^nd Street was birthed, but my understanding is that 2^nd Street was launched by Newberg Friends to be a bridge to those for whom Church might be an uncomfortable experience, or those who might make lifelong churchgoers uncomfortable.

In those days 2^nd Street attracted people who had been hurt or marginalized by their previous churches, people who had broken marriages and broken lives, People for whom Church didn’t feel safe. We met in a building that didn’t look like a church, recovery was part of our landscape, and smoke breaks were a Sunday morning routine.

I guess we were edgy, by the standards 30 years ago, but being edgy wasn’t the point. In fact, just the opposite was true. The point was to be a safe place for those for whom traditional church was too far over their edge.

2^nd Street came into being to be a bridge between the two extremes of the social and religious spectrum in Newberg. 2^nd Street was common ground between those who saw church as the nurturing mother who raised them, and those who saw church as an angry bully that kept punching them in the face.

2^nd Street didn’t argue with either side, it simply stood as common ground where the two could meet each other, little by little get used to each other, and eventually see the humanity, and the grace of God, in each other.

Even today, through the drop-in Center, 2^nd Street is acting as common ground where the churches and greater Newberg community, can rub elbows with those who are often forgotten or ignored by the church and community, so the two groups can get used to each other, and hopefully begin the see the humanity and the grace of God in each other.

So, what do we make of this heritage?

2^nd Street has always been a bridge. 2^nd Street has always seen itself as a safe place of common ground between those who, at first glance, don’t seem to fit together or who have a suspicion of each other.

Could that be our Why?

You can talk to 10 different groups and probably get a dozen opinions on what the greatest problem or issue the world is facing today is. But I think if you look closely, the common denominator in all the issues is a lack of listening, a lack of recognizing the humanity in each other, and a lack of humility. Both sides of most issues or debates are convinced they are right, and the other side has nothing of value to say to them.

In far too many cases, the church is just as divided as the rest of the world.

We live in a world where people are shouting their opinions and their own “truth” at the top of their lungs and it is so loud no one can hear anyone else. Unfortunately, large segments of the Church, on both sides of most issues, are in there shouting right along with everyone else.

The world doesn’t need another church who shouts at the top of it’s lungs. The world doesn’t need another church who separates itself from those who think differently or see life differently.

The noise is deafening so nobody is listening.

The world desperately needs the Church to lead them out of this angry, belligerent, deaf and blind hole we find ourselves in. I think Jesus would say it’s our job.

Richard Rohr says, “the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.”

The world desperately needs a bridge. The world desperately needs a place where the decibel level has been cranked down. The world desperately needs a place that stands as common ground where the differing views can meet each other, little by little get used to each other, and eventually see the humanity, and the grace of God, in each other.

I think it is in 2^nd Street’s DNA to do just that. I think that may be our Why.

What is Our Why? Part 1

 

In his book, Start with Why, Simon Sinek argues that if you want people to respond to what you do, you need a clear sense of why you do it. Most organizations can tell you what they do and how they do it, but often Why they do it gets lost in the shuffle. Effectiveness and competence are necessary, but all things being relatively equal, people are drawn to purpose and passion.

Sinek goes on to explain that finding, or remembering, your Why is not hard, it just requires some self-examination. If we take time to look back over our lives, most of us will see themes and tendencies that are clues to our identity—to who we are. That is what our Why grows out of—who we are.

When I do this for myself, this is what I come up with.

My mother’s family was instrumental in starting a denomination called the Church of God Independent Holiness. It was a very strict, very conservative movement where men couldn’t wear ties or any other form of accessories like cuff links or rings. Women couldn’t wear makeup or jewelry.

My father’s family, on the other hand, were Danish Lutherans. While the church was a central part of their social and cultural life, it made few demands on their lifestyle or personal choices.

As you can see, my Christian heritage came from two very divergent sources. In fact, in today’s climate those two groups might have openly questioned whether the other was actually Christian.

Our immediate family chose to attend a Nazarene church because they felt it fell somewhere in the middle. In my sophomore year of high school, we changed to the Church of God (not the Independent Holiness group).

When it came to my college education, I started at a Church of God college and finished my degree at a Mennonite Brethren college. I got my master’s degree at a Nazarene institution, and my doctorate at George Fox.

In the various places I lived while in the Navy, I was part of a Conservative Baptist Church, a Wesleyan Church and a Disciples of Christ church.

When I was pastoring the church in Mariposa, one of the groups I hung around with consisted of a Lutheran pastor, a Methodist pastor, a Catholic priest and a Foursquare pastor. We rode motorcycles together and backpacked together. (I know, that sounds like the start of a joke: “A Lutheran pastor, a Methodist Pastor and a Catholic priest went backpacking together….”) During the time I was there I exchanged pulpits with nearly all of them. Our church was richer for it.

My favorite spiritual director was a Catholic hermit. His theology was different than mine, but that’s not what mattered. He listened to me and helped me think deeply about my own faith.

One of my nephews is a Southern Baptist pastor. We disagree on several issues, but when my office burned down along with my entire library, he gathered some of his books and commentaries, begged books off of his friends and other pastors and sent me a “starter library” to get me through until I could restock my own (of course that was before you could look up everything you need to know—and a lot of things you don’t—on the internet).

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I have a deep appreciation and affection for the vast breadth and diversity of the Body of Christ. If you asked me why I was a pastor, I would have to say that at the root of it I deeply love the Church.

I believe the Church could be the most influential, world changing entity on Earth if we would live up to our potential. To do that, however, we have to start listening to each other, appreciating each other and learning from each other. We need to think deeply about who God is, who we are, and what we can learn from the diversity in the Church.

Those who are Calvinist have much to teach the rest of us about the sovereignty of God. Wesleyans have much to teach the rest of us about personal responsibility and holiness. Catholics and Anglicans have much to teach us about tradition and sacrament. The Charismatic movement has much to teach us about the dynamic nature of the Spirit. We Quakers have much to teach the rest of the Church about appreciating the presence of the Spirit in each other.

To live up to our potential we’re going to have to quit blocking each other out—canceling each other—and start listening to each other. We need to think deeply about our faith instead of just thoughtlessly clinging to the version of Christianity we’re accustomed to. The stakes of an unexamined faith is too high.

My job as a pastor is not to separate my little group and protect it from those who think differently. My call, my Why, is to expose those I pastor to the richness that is their birthright and heritage and challenge them to think deeply about their faith so we can live up to the potential Christ planted in us as a local church and us as a part of the big C church.

That is my Why. Everything that I do comes out of, or should come out of, that.

In my next post we’ll examine 2^nd Street’s Why.

How do We Shift Our Focus Away From Mere Survival?

 

We’ve Been at this Covid-19 thing for over a year and a half. As former pastor and blogger Carey Nieuwhof put it, the pandemic has shifted from being an acute crisis to being a chronic condition.

When the pandemic first raised its ugly head, most organizations, including churches, including our church, shifted into survival mode. We all did what we had to do to get through the crisis, and we adapted our operations to accommodate to the world as it was. That works fine, and is even necessary, in the short term. But now it is obvious that COVID is not something we’re going to get past in a few months, it is something that could potentially affect our way of life for years.

So, this raises an important question. How do we shift our thinking from surviving-and-hanging-in-there-until-it’s-over, to how do we answer Jesus’ call to be his body and his hands and feet in this new world we find ourselves?

When God first led the Children of Israel out of Egypt, they saw themselves as just that, the descendants of the patriarch Jacob/Israel. But God was molding them into a nation, so God provided them with the Law, animal sacrifice, other temple sacraments, and sacred objects like the Ark of the Covenant to set them apart as God’s chosen people and reinforce their identity as a nation.

Over the course of their history, Israel had several designated sacred places where they practiced these sacraments and kept these sacred objects. First there was the Tabernacle Moses commissioned while they were wandering in the wilderness. After settling in the promised land, a more permanent location, Shiloh, was chosen. When David became King and chose Jerusalem as his capital, the Ark was moved to Jerusalem and eventually Solomon built the temple that became the center of Jewish life and identity.

Centuries later, the people of Judah and Israel were taken into exile and the temple was destroyed and their sacred objects were plundered. Suddenly the centerpiece of their religious identity was no longer available to them. They had to figure out how to be who they were without the very thing that gave them that sense of identity.

During that time in exile, new innovations were introduced into the Jewish faith. Rabbis, local synagogues and community owned scrolls of the Torah were developed to fill the void left by the loss of priests, the temple, and the sacred objects. By the time the exile was over, many of the Jewish people returned home, and Herod rebuilt the temple, rabbis and synagogues had become a permanent part of the Jewish religious landscape.

Why did things not return to “normal.” I think there are a couple of reasons. First, those who did return to Israel still saw value in having local teachers and local places to worship and learn—that’s what had kept Judaism alive during the exile. The second reason is that a large chunk of the Jewish people never came home; they chose to, or had to, stay where they were.

In some ways we have been, and still are, experiencing a form of exile. Things in our lives have radically changed and many of us are looking forward to things getting back to normal. Things will settle out to some form of normal, but it won’t be the normal we knew before COVID. Out of necessity people have developed new habits and have learned to navigate life in new ways. Some of those acquired habits might be abandoned when we return from exile, but some of those things will become permanent fixtures in our landscape.

The truth is, many of us will choose not to return home. Some of the people who have disappeared during COVID will never come back—at least not in person. Over the past year-and-a-half we’ve rewired our brains. New ways of doing things have replace many of the old and we couldn’t replicate the old normal no matter how hard we tried.

 Our job now is to figure out some new ways to practice our faith and new places to house the sacred. Nobody really knows what the new normal will look like. We can choose to stubbornly hold onto what was, or we can creatively lean into whatever comes and seize the opportunity of what could be.

If we choose to wait for the old normal to return, we’ll be waiting forever. If we choose to lean into what comes, we can start being what Jesus is calling us to be right now.

We’ll talk about that in upcoming posts.

Passion Week Day 3

 Read: Matthew 26:6-13

 

On Wednesday of Passion Week, Jesus was anointed in Bethany.

Culture plays a huge part in how we view things, what we see, and what we don’t see. In China, people blow their noses right onto the ground. Most westerners think that is disgusting, but the Chinese see the ground as the place where you dispose of things you don’t want. When westerners blow their noses into a handkerchief or a tissue, people from China would think that is disgusting. They would wonder, “why would they want to keep that?”

Our cultural lenses are just as powerful when we read the Bible.

If you were a first-century Jew, and you were either present and watching what was happening or reading the account Matthew wrote, there would be nothing in this story that played by the rules, that would be considered acceptable by social norms. Nobody experiencing this or reading about it would be comfortable. Even the disciples, who by now probably thought they had Jesus and his priorities figured out, were thrown a curve. The only one comfortable here is Jesus, and he is turning everything upside down on everyone else.

Jesus was eating at Simon the Lepers' house. Lepers were considered unclean. To be in the same room as one was unacceptable; to accept hospitality from one was scandalous.

Next, a woman comes and pours expensive Nard over Jesus’ head. An adult Jewish woman would never talk to a man who wasn’t her husband or brother or father, much less touch one. Either of these two things would have had most self-respecting Jews heading for the exits.

But wait, there’s more.

Pouring expensive oil over the head was symbolic of anointing someone to be king. That act was the responsibility of a priest—a male priest—yet Jesus accepts this anointing from a common, unnamed woman.

The disciples begin to critique the extravagance saying the money should have been spent on the poor, after all Jesus always advocated for the poor. But Jesus even rebukes them.

You see, taking care of the poor falls under the 2^nd most important commandment (love you neighbor as yourself) and Jesus wants them to understand that you can’t fully fulfill the 2^nd most important commandment until you’ve fulfilled the most important commandment (love the Lord your God with all your heart).

Lest you think the woman got away without her actions being turned upside down, Jesus accepted her anointing him as king, but he described it as anointing him for burial. After all, that’s how his kingdom would come, through death and resurrection, not through might and conquest.

That is always how his kingdom always comes.

Jesus started out this week by turning the tables on the Roman authorities when he rode into Jerusalem. On Monday he turned over tables in the temple. 

Passion week is all about Jesus turning over tables.

Passion Week Tuesday

 Read: Luke 21:1-4

 

Have you noticed that Jesus noticed?

The gospels are full of Jesus paying attention to things that nobody else noticed. He noticed that the woman with the issue of blood had touched him as he was walking through a crowd, he noticed Zacchaeus watching him from a tree when no one else saw him, he noticed the man sitting by the pool of Bethesda waiting for the waters to be stirred when no one else cared.

On this particular day of Passion Week, when each successive day is marching Jesus closer to his encounter with the cross, Jesus noticed a poor widow drop a couple of pennies into the temple offering. The woman wasn’t wealthy, and she wasn’t what the rest of society would consider important, so I suspect it had been a while since anyone had noticed her at all.

I don’t think Jesus commented on her because he wanted to have a teaching moment with his disciples, I think he pointed her actions out to his disciples because he was truly touched by her faithfulness and selflessness.

The day before this Jesus had passed judgment on the temple system by throwing out the money changers, immediately after this Jesus prophesies about the destruction of the temple in 70 AD. But Jesus doesn’t critique her gift because of who she gave it to. What Jesus saw was the sincerity and sacrifice of her gift and it touched him. I wonder if it was one of the highlights of his week.

It is easy to think of Jesus watching our actions and categorizing them as good or bad, right or wrong, and putting a checkmark in the appropriate column on our ledger. But this story makes me think that Jesus is paying attention, but he’s looking for something different. I think he might by scanning back and forth looking for people who are doing something sincere, loving, and selfless, but so small no one else notices.

I think he looks for those things because those are the things that touch him.

--

Bruce

Dominus tecum

 Read Matthew 21: 12-17 

 

On Monday of Passion week, Jesus cleared the temple.

 

 I can just imagine how the disciples might have felt when they woke up that morning. Just the day before, Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem to shouts of hosanna.

 

Earlier that week the Roman Consul, Pontius Pilate, would have ridden into Jerusalem from His Headquarters in Caesarea. Pilate would have made it a point to be in the City for the Passover because of the crowds that would be there. It would be a potentially volatile time.

 

Pilate would have ridden into the city on a warhorse with a full military escort so everyone would know who was in charge. When Jesus rode in on Sunday, he humbly came into the city from the opposite direction on the colt of a donkey--everything he did was the opposite. What he did would be seen as mocking the Romans and their military authority.

 

The crowd loved it and loved him.

 

Jesus was at the zenith of his popularity. The disciples may well have been anticipating what might be coming next. Maybe they were wondering if Jesus was finally going to be taking his throne and push the Romans out. I suspect they couldn’t believe what he did next.

 

One of the acts the Messiah was expected to do was to take authority over the temple. Jesus did it in a way no one expected and few appreciated. He grabbed a whip of cords and began turning over tables. While he was running out the money changers he was shouting, “My house will be called a house of prayer, ’but you are making it 'a den of robbers.’” That’s the same thing the prophet Jeremiah said in Jeremiah 7 when he was prophesying about the destruction of the first temple twenty years after that.

 

The religious leaders couldn’t have missed that or misinterpreted that. And that’s when they committed to killing Jesus.

 

Now Jesus had alienated the Roman leaders, and the Jewish leaders both. I can just see the disciples burying their faces in their hands thinking, “and just when things were going so well.”