Christ Seeker

Witness is the Word...

You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.

The words of Jesus.  You will receive power.  You shall be my witnesses.  Witnesses in Jerusalem.  In our homes.  In our neighborhoods.  In the places we live.  Among the people we live with.  Witnesses in Judea.  In our communities.  In our cities.  Among our countrymen and women.  Witnesses in Samaria.  Among our enemies.  Those who do not look like us, believe like us, look like us, spend money like us.  Those we would rather keep at arm's length.  Witnesses in the remotest part of the earth.  In the forgotten and abandoned corners.  In the city centers and back-alleys.  Among the rich and the poor.  In the desert places and the most fruitful fields.  There is not a place we cannot go nor a person we cannot reach because the power and presence of the Holy Spirit compels us, fills us, pushes us, draws us out.  Out of ourselves.  Out of our comfortable lives.  Out of our sinful and narcissistic perspectives.  This power gets us involved.  It connects us viscerally with those around us.  This power will not let us stand on the sidelines or observe as bystanders. 

It's important to note that this power isn't ours to possess.  Rather, it possesses us.  It isn't ours to control...it controls us.  It isn't ours to command...it commands us.  The Holy Spirit pursues us relentlessly and tirelessly.  His energy never flags.  His passion to reclaim our souls, to stake claim to every part of our lives, never fails.  And it is to this amazing power, this amazing love, this amazing grace that we bear witness...in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the remotest parts of the earth. 

Once the Holy Spirit blows through us, filling us, and compelling us to be his witnesses...two more questions are pressed.  What is our witness?  How should we witness?  In the second chapter of Acts we see Peter bearing his witness.  A crowd has gathered, drawn by the sound of the Holy Spirit and the disciples speaking miraculously in the different dialects/languages of the Mediterranean basin.  In what reminds me of a Mardi Gras event, the crowd can't decide if these men are just drunk of if there is really something important happening here.  Enter Peter.  Filled by the power of the Holy Spirit, he makes his witness.  And in making his witness, he clearly articulates the missio Dei.  He shares the story of God's mission to reclaim and redeem the world for his very own.  Tracing God's plan throughout the Old Testament, he now offers the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as evidence that God's plan has come to fruition.  In this man, Jesus, God's purposes are revealed and made clear.  What God did for Jesus, he will do for all humanity for the Crucified One is now Lord over all.  

What about our witness?  Like Peter, are we called to stand on street corners and preach?  Or does it look different?  How should this account inform our own witness in our lives and in our time and in our context?  First, I think it's important that we seek out where the "crowd" in our life is gathering.  The crowds were drawn to the disciples that day.  They came seeking or at least spectating.  There was something about the disciples that drew them to that place.  Where in our lives do we sense people being drawn in?  Is it our neighbors?  A co-worker who seems to be reaching out?  A classmate making friendly overtures?  A friend who keeps asking for time?  Someone new that we have met with whom we seem to have a connection?  Who is the Holy Spirit drawing to us? 

Second, we wait for the question.  "What does this mean?" The people asked the disciples.  They wanted to know what was happening.  What was the reason for all the commotion.  As we live our lives authentically before others, the question will get asked.  It will come in many forms but the gist of it all is this...why do you live the way you do?  What is it about you that is different?  And when that question comes, we must be prepared to share.  Peter spent three years walking alongside Jesus.  He was with him through the highs and the lows (though he did run at the lowest of lows...) of ministry.  He saw Jesus in many different contexts and in many different situations.  He studied Jesus' teaching, asked questions, probed for answers.  He reflected.  He doubted.  He discovered.  And when the time came for him to make his witness, he was ready.  He was prepared.  This is what informs and will ultimately determine the quality of the content of our witness.    Frankly, there are no shortcuts to this.  We must spend time with Jesus.  We must spend time reflecting, probing, doubting, and asking our questions.  Through prayer.  Through Bible study.  With other believers.  With people who don't believe as we do. And the more we wrestle with the Jesus story, the more our own story will take shape.  And as our own story takes shape, the more confident and sure our witness will become. 

A friend of mine who is involved in Allelon has been asked a lot recently about what our church believes.  So she came to me to find out if we have a mission statement or statement of faith.  We don't have either.  What we do have is the life of Jesus as revealed by Scripture.  Rather than trying to boil that life down to a series of propositional statements about Jesus, I would much rather we seek to live life alongside his as Peter did.  I would much rather we engage in the messy, painful, freeing process of conforming our lives to his life.  And so I asked this friend of mine to think about how she would describe our life together in Allelon.  What ARE we about?  What DO we believe?  Her answers to these questions will form the basis of HER witness to her friends.  This, it seems to me, will yield a much fuller and richer witness to Jesus Christ than some static mission statement. 

Absent in body not spirit...

I am sitting in an airport awaiting my flight back to Madison, drinking a cup of Peet's coffee, and reflecting on my day.  I made a quick trip to Cincinnati this weekend to participate in a very good friend's installation service.  What's an installation service?  It is a special service of worship where Presbyterians mark the beginning of a relationship between a pastor and her/his congregation.  I love this part of our Reformed Tradition (inaugurating a pastoral relationship with worship) although I could do without the name "installation service."  We install bathroom fixtures, not pastors.

Anyway, several of the people I met this weekend asked me the same question.  How could you be gone when it's only your second week out of your home?  (If you haven't been following our journey, Allelon just moved into a local coffee house for our Sunday gathering time...)  Two things immediately pop into my head at this point, as I reflect back on the last 48 hours.  First, I cannot tell you how freeing it is for me to know that "church" can go on without me.  I am overwhelmed by the people in Allelon and their willingness to be led by the Spirit of God in this work.  What I discovered this weekend (and instinctually knew...) is that not only can Allelon go on, it can thrive in my absence!  When I called my wife today to ask her how things went, she shared some amazing stuff.  Great questions.  Great discussion.  Great prayer time as we sought the Lord on behalf of each other, Allelon and our future together, and our community.  (Though I was absent in body, I was present in spirit, praying for the same things this morning in Cincy...) Regardless of where God takes us from here, it seems clear that we are moving towards becoming a community of mature disciples in Christ.  And that is awesome!

Secondly, I know God had a reason for me to be here in Cincinnati this weekend.  Spending time with my dear friends and colleagues in ministry was a tremendous blessing.  They, intentionally or unintentionally, preached to me throughout my time here, reinforcing over and over again the centrality of the Person of Jesus Christ.  I think of the hours I spent with my friend Drew yesterday, talking about how he is seeing Jesus at work in his community and his congregation.  I think of the sermon I heard my friend Ed preach about the need to keep Jesus at the center of our lives.  I think of my friend Chip and his words at the "installation" service about sheep needing a shepherd to show them the way home to God's sheepfold.  All of these words challenged me, pushed me, encouraged me, and strengthened me in ways I am only beginning to discover. 

One of the great temptations I face in my life at this point is to believe that I am somehow indispensible.  That Allelon cannot move forward without my leadership.  And while it is true that God has called me to play an important part in planting, nurturing, and growing this new church, if I am not careful I can fell into the trap of believing that the "planting, nurturing, and growing" is all because of me.  So it is weekends like this that remind me that it is God who is in charge of this whole process.  It is God who is on mission in Sun Prairie.  It is God who is raising up and drawing people to himself through Allelon.  It is God who is at work and I am so blessed to just be along for the ride! 

The Missional Journey...

The journey continues...nine months ago, I moved my family over a thousand miles to a growing suburb on the edge of Madison, WI called Sun Prairie.  In doing so, I left behind the safety and security of a loving church family.  I left behind dear friends.  I left behind a ministry that I had poured my heart and soul into for six years.  Why did I come?  It's a question I get a lot from the people I meet.  After all, I hadn't lived in this area before.  I maybe knew a handful of people, none of them really well.  The cultural distance between Madison, WI and Mobile, AL is enormous.  And, whew, the winters are cold!!! I guess the short answer to the question is "God."  God called me here.  Several years ago, God's Spirit began to nurture a dream in my heart of a truly missional community.  A community that saw God's mission of redemption and reconciliation in the world as its "raison d'être", or its "reason for being." This became a passion of mine so when the opportunity came to start a new church with this missional/incarnational vision at its heart, I felt compelled to pursue it.  So here I am.  And as this missional journey has unfolded over the last several months, I have found myself noting the significant milestones along the way.  My first day at the coffee house (now affectionately known as my "office"...).  My first day playing basketball at the athletic club.  My first spiritual conversation with someone in Sun Prairie.  Our initial dinner meetings with people who felt called to join us in this journey.  Our first Sunday gathering.  Well, we've recently passed another big milestone...our first Sunday gathering out in the community.  As of Easter Sunday, we are now meeting in Beans and Cream Coffee Shop. We've "gone public" as it were.  And the journey only gets more exciting from here! 

As we move forward, it is critical that we not lose sight of the missional life God is inviting us into.  For surely temptations abound.  There is the temptation of pragmatism.  To fall into a "whatever works" attitude.  Or the temptation of efficiency.  To make our fellowship run like a "well-oiled machine."  There is the temptation of defaulting back into forms of church that we are more comfortable with but which, by their very nature, stifle our missional DNA.  I know of only one way to resist such temptations and that is to turn to God's Word.  To immerse ourselves in the story of the early church and walk the paths they trod in order to discover again what it truly means to be "on mission" with God. 

So Allelon is taking up the study of the Book of Acts.  We will take it a chapter at a time and I hope to share with you in this space what we are discovering and invite you into the journey with us.  Perhaps, as we move along this path, you will have insights from your own situation and context that can help us move forward.  Perhaps when we meet obstacles, you can show us the way through.  And vice versa, of course.  Regardless of what happens, I look forward to this being a "living record" of our own successes and failures as we seek to be faithful to this vision God has placed on our hearts. 

Acts 1: An Exercise in Paying Attention (great phrase I picked up from the very Rev. Beth Daniel...)

The early church had been given a mandate. In the same way we've been given a mandate.  It's a commission from the Risen Christ.  "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth."  Sounds awesome!  But now what?  That's kind of how I feel right now.  I try to put myself in the company of the apostles as they hung out with the Risen Christ.  How it would feel to hear the call to "wait?"  To wonder what kind of "power" this was that Christ was promising?  Would this "power", this "Holy Spirit" restore God's Kingdom to earth?  To have some idea of the sacrifice Jesus was asking me to make when he calls us to be his witnesses (witness = martyros in the Greek = from which we get the word "martyr"...).  And then to retreat to the upper room of the house where we were staying to actually engage in this "waiting period." 

Then I note with growing conviction that "waiting" for the apostles did not mean being passive.  They were active in their waiting.  They used the time to prepare themselves through prayer.  Verse fourteen says that they were all "continuously devoting" themselves to prayer.  This single-minded commitment to come before the Father as they waited for the Holy Spirit sets a powerful example before us.  If I am being honest, I think there are few times in my life where I can claim to have "continuously devoted" myself to prayer.  Here is what Gerhard Kittel had to say about this phrase in his classic work, The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament.

"Every great decision in the apostolic period, and in the whole life of early Christianity, is sustained by persistent prayer. In this prayer Christians with thanksgiving and worship brought their decisions and their cause as petitions to God, seeking guidance and direction and clarity from Him. This persistence in prayer, which is just as natural as prayer itself, is determined—we can trace the sequence exactly—by looking to Jesus. Jesus, often in night-long prayer, brought His decisions, His cause, and those connected with it, before God. As the Son, He sought to do the Father’s work in an ever new experience of unity with the will and intention and nature of the Father, to receive power for this purpose, and to realize that He was hidden in the Father’s hand (→ εὔχομαι, II, 803 f.). He not only directed His disciples to pray in this way (Lk. 11:1–13); He also told them to persist in prayer (Lk. 18:1–8). But this involves a different attitude and manner of prayer from those customary in contemporary Judaism, which had fixed hours and patterns of prayer.The disciples continued the type of prayer which they had seen in Jesus and which He commanded them. And they in turn passed it on to primitive Christianity. In this they stood apart from both the Jewish and the Gentile world around them."

So in an effort to literally follow in the footsteps of the early church, we will be spending this Sunday's gathering in prayer.  We will pray for one another.  We will pray for Allelon.  We will pray for the future of our missional band of sisters and brothers.  We will pray for Sun Prairie and Windsor and DeForest and Madison and Dane County.  We will pray for our Jerusalem, our Judea, our Samaria, and our world.  And we will pray for power.  The power to become witnesses.  The power to look beyond our natural, narcissistic selves to the "one anothers" in our lives and love them in the name of Jesus. 

My Favorite Easter Sermon...

An Easter Sermon by John Chrysostom (347-407 A.D.)

Are there any who are devout lovers of God?
Let them enjoy this beautiful bright festival!

Are there any who are grateful servants?
Let them rejoice and enter into the joy of their Lord!

Are there any weary with fasting?
Let them now receive their wages!

If any have toiled from the first hour,
let them receive their due reward;
If any have come after the third hour,
let him with gratitude join in the Feast!
And he that arrived after the sixth hour,
let him not doubt; for he too shall sustain no loss.
And if any delayed until the ninth hour,
let him not hesitate; but let him come too.
And he who arrived only at the eleventh hour,
let him not be afraid by reason of his delay.
For the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first.
He gives rest to him that comes at the eleventh hour,
as well as to him that toiled from the first.

To this one He gives, and upon another He bestows.
He accepts the works as He greets the endeavor.
The deed He honors and the intention He commends.
Let us all enter into the joy of the Lord!

First and last alike receive your reward;
rich and poor, rejoice together!
Sober and slothful, celebrate the day!
You that have kept the fast, and you that have not,
rejoice today for the Table is richly laden!

Feast royally on it, the calf is a fatted one.
Let no one go away hungry. Partake, all, of the cup of faith.
Enjoy all the riches of His goodness!

Let no one grieve at his poverty,
for the universal kingdom has been revealed.

Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again;
for forgiveness has risen from the grave.

Let no one fear death, for the Death of our Savior has set us free.
He has destroyed it by enduring it.
He destroyed Hell when He descended into it.
He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh.

Isaiah foretold this when he said,
“You, O Hell, have been troubled by encountering Him below.”
Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with.
It was in an uproar because it is mocked.
It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed.
It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated.
It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive.

Hell took a body, and discovered God.
It took earth, and encountered Heaven.
It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.

O death, where is thy sting?
O Hell, where is thy victory?

Christ is Risen, and you, o death, are annihilated!
Christ is Risen, and the evil ones are cast down!
Christ is Risen, and the angels rejoice!
Christ is Risen, and life is liberated!

Christ is Risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead;
for Christ having risen from the dead,
is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

To Him be Glory and Power forever and ever. Amen!

Looking up!!!

One of my favorite stories in all of Scripture is one from the Old Testament in 2 Kings, chapter six where the Aramean king is trying to defeat Israel.  Over and over again he tries to attack but the king of Israel always seems to know when and where the attacks will happen.  Finally, the Aramean king asks his servants how this can be and they tell him that Elisha the prophet is the one to blame.  He is the one sending the information and so the king turns his armies towards Dothan where Elisha is staying.  They show up and the array is impressive.  So impressive that Elisha's servant is scared to death.  He cannot imagine how they will get out this trap.  But Elisha prays and asks the Lord to open the servant's eyes so he can see what is really going on.  The servant looks up and suddenly sees the chariots and horses of the Lord surrounding the Arameans! 

Look up!  See what God is really doing in the world.  Stand ready and faithful to go on mission with God. That's what this life is all about.  Last evening, I had the pleasure of hanging out with a new friend.  He and I met because he is intrigued by what God is doing through this new church in Sun Prairie.  He attends another church about forty minutes away but has been feeling God's call to be more involved locally.  So we met and I described the vision we have to equip and send out God's people to be missionaries in their workplaces, their homes, their neighborhoods, wherever God has already placed them in life.  He struggled at first but then you could almost see the tumblers fall into place.  Instinctively he knew "church" was more than a building or a worship service.  In his soul, he knew that God had a greater vision for his life than an hour on Sunday morning or a committee meeting during the week.  God wants him on mission.  God wants him reaching out to his unchurched friends with the Good News of the Gospel.  God wants him to be a part of what God is doing in our community and in the world. 

I felt a lot like Elisha last night.  It was very cool to watch the Spirit open this young man's eyes to see the glories He has prepared for us if we will just faithfully follow.  And it reminded me once again that the failure of the institutional church to inspire is my failure.  It is my failure to cast a vision that is worthy of God and worthy of God's mission in the world.  God's people long to be a part of something bigger, something grander than themselves and if we will just release them, challenge them, encourage them, SEND them out, they will surprise us with their passion!