The Transforming Power of an Image

It is Advent once again. I don’t have to tell you this, of course. If you walk into our church building on Sunday, you will know immediately something is afoot. The church is festooned with trees, garlands, wreaths, and candles—in a word, concrete images that suggest something extraordinary is happening. It is like the more glorious a thing is, the more we want to set its significance to both proclaim it and make our joy more complete. 

Speaking of images, we live in a world surrounded by images. Social media and the internet, not to mention TV, or our computers, phones, and clothing, all bear images. As we drive our cars down the road, our senses are confronted with images that tell a story of a kind of delicious food, a certain kind of attire, or a gadget we might need to make our lives happier or better. It isn’t that we discovered the power of images in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. People have always used images because images are more powerful than words or bullet points. Images are processed 60,000 times faster than text and sort of bypass our critical thinking and factualities. 

The ancients knew this, and the way Rome held power was through images of Caesar. His image was everywhere, reminding people that they owed supreme loyalty, safety, sons, and daughters to Caesar. You might not see Caesar unless you were a person of supreme rank or royalty, but the poorest peasant knew who he was and that they owed him everything. So when the Apostle Paul writes that Jesus is the image of the invisible God, he essentially dropped a bomb shell on Rome's reign of terror, and it has been subverting lives, communities, nations, and empires ever since. 

Join us Sunday, and we begin to look at all the excellencies of Jesus this Advent Season. It really is a season of joy and wonder. I am so thankful that we have a whole month set aside to ponder the mystery of the Incarnation!

Gospel Saturation

Well, Christmas music has begun colonizing the Bluetooth. Too early for my taste, but I can affirm the desperate hunger we have for the brightness and cheer of Christmas, and it’s hard to blame our society for our impatience to feel that. What I don’t really care for is new Christmas songs. I think my parents, like most people, were nostalgic for their own childhood memories, and so they just played those songs around our house. So for me, Christmas is properly scored by Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, and Andy Williams. Elvis too, but my wife limits the number of times I can spin that record in a given year. In this way (and others too), I’m a bit of a man born out of his time. 

Those were the years of the advent of color television. Throughout the Sixties, NBC promised to show us the world “In Living Color.” Screens now had a feature called “saturation,” where you could turn up color the way you could turn up the volume. It could blow you away. This became a symbol for deeper realities, as RCA President David Sarnoff told President Eisenhower in 1958: “We want everyone in the world to see America in its true and natural colors… Here we do not seek to be anything other than what we are. And what we are is not hidden by curtains and what we say not hidden by censorship.”

Saturation, or “Living Color” became a way of talking about authenticity. At St. Patrick, we use the word saturation to describe “when there's so much grace around that earth looks heavenly.” We say we want to saturate our neighborhoods with something like that. The world, or at least our everyday sense of it, has become dull enough that we feel a sense of relief when peppermint and colored lights jump the gun as early as October. But let’s chase that down. Let’s get curious about what that relief might be telling us about our deeper desires for glorious encounters, and where they can be filled. Where is heaven local? 

Not to Be Served but to Serve

One of the favorite things to do is listen to children talk about what they want to be when they grow up. “I want to be a teacher!” “I want to be a nurse!” “I want to be a preacher!” “I want to be a professional ball player!” “I want to be a garbage man!” (Yes, I have heard that) I have heard lots of aspirations from the children I have been around. I have seen in their games the imitation of future vocations, and it is a beautiful thing, something we should not take for granted, the fact that our children even dream of a future. But there is one thing I have never heard a child say they aspire to be or even mimic in their play, and that is, “I want to be a servant.”

We should not expect that, the image of a servant being one who serves, one who is not their own master, and sort of lives to do the bidding of another, and yet……In our text, Jesus gives the closest thing to a person's mission statement that I can find in the Bible, and he said this: “I came not to be served but to serve….” The Lord of Glory, creator of all that we see, worthy of all glory and adoration, comes not with the trappings of royalty, but with a towel, at the lowest place, washing our dirty feet. 

Yeah, Jesus sort of turns the values of the world, the things we value the most, on its head and further declares that the way to gut-wrenching joy is not through power and control but through being a servant, through serving the most. Is this even possible? If so, how do we even wrap our imagination around this? Well, this Sunday, I invite you to wrestle with this with me. Interested? Believe me, I get it if you are not, this is too radical, perhaps too costly, and a bridge too far. But if the one we claim to follow says this is the way, we'd best listen up. 

Hope to see you this Sunday! 

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Halloween is maybe the last bastion of true neighboring in suburban America. It’s a shame that the liturgical story it tells is largely one of glorifying horror. Yet, like those buckets of trick or treating treasures, it’s a mixed bag. There’s something going on in the dynamics of Halloween that is truly worth celebrating. People come out of their houses. They walk and talk. Their kids run around together, laughing. Driveway fire pits transform into tables of welcome, where weary parents, laden with discarded costumes and strollers, can linger and get warm. Some misguided folks use the opportunity to hand out Nutrigrain bars or gospel tracts instead of candy. (These are the houses the kids know in their wisdom to avoid.) But there’s no doubt about it: this celebration of death somehow brings the neighborhood back to life. 

I was talking with a friend and fellow pastor who serves in Louisville about their vision and mission statement language this week. There was a lot of talk about doing things for others in there, which is a good thing. But I suggested that maybe it’s it was too broad. C.S. Lewis has his senior devil Screwtape give advice to keep his patient’s mind on "others" in the abstract. He should have him focused on others “out there” so that he ignores the others he can actually love in the everyday.  That’s why the Bible talks, not just about others, but about neighbors. 

I was thrilled the other day to walk in on my wife watching old episodes of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. She said she’s been thinking lately about how formative the old pastor’s public television show had shaped her as a child. I’m grateful to have shared that formative experience. I didn’t know at the time that the nice man in comfy sneakers and a snazzy sweater unashamedly viewed what he was doing as ministry. Reverend Fred Rogers was indeed a passionate and outspoken advocate for “making goodness attractive again.” He did this in the everyday by dwelling richly with his neighbors, whom he defined as “those whose lives move near our own.” Then he would often quote Jesus’ command to love these neighbors, the specific others, as ourselves.

That’s what we’re talking about this Sunday: how what James calls “the law of freedom” compels us to creatively use every opportunity to make goodness attractive to our neighbors again. Join us!

As obvious as it is in the Bible, people are still suspicious of the idea of feasting as a biblical construct. I don’t know if it comes from the rationalism of the Enlightenment or just the idea (and many Presbyterians are guilty of this) that the more miserable we are, the holier we must be. As if joy and excess by nature must be sinful or at least suspicious. Nevertheless, most religious people view feasting as an afterthought in spiritual formation rather than being at the heart of the great dance. 

I only ask that we give the Bible and Jesus a chance to not just explain but demonstrate why God formed his ancient people through feasts. Jesus did the same (and was met by suspicion from the religion community), and the end of the world is a great wedding feast. Feasting is a word in our Lexicon, and at St. Patrick it is of first importance. Make no mistake, feasting is not auxiliary to the action, but at the heart of the action. 

This Sunday, we will talk, and ponder, and in the end, we will feast. It is all there in the liturgy. Hope you will join us. Oh, and remember the time changes this Sunday. We fall back, which means we all can catch up on that hour of sleep we lost six months ago. I am so excited about that too!

In C. S. Lewis' book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace, a troubled boy, meets Ramandu, who is a retired star living on an island near the end of the world. (It is sort of science fiction) When he tells Eustace that, Eustace says to him, “In our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” To this disenchanted statement, Ramandu says, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”

I thought of this when I thought of our subject of tables. Tables are everywhere; some are simple, some are elaborate. They are a necessity in our lives because we are born hungry. They are made of wood, plastic, or perhaps metal. But like Ramandu tells Eustace, that is only what they are made of; tables are infinitely more than just a means of holding food. 

I say this because tables are everywhere in the Bible. They are sort of a centerpiece. From the dawn of creation when God sets a lavish table for our first parents until the world ends at a cosmic table, tables are infinitely more than elaborate carriers of food and drink. Even in our weekly worship, the climax of meeting with God is at a table. So when we see Jesus reclining at a table, we know tables are infinitely more than just food and drink because there is a violent reaction that takes place among certain folk. Which must suggest that being at a table is a mystery, laden with meaning--doing theology perhaps? 

Intriguing? I think so. Sunday, we will talk about it, and that afternoon we will experience it! Hope to see you then.

Seek First the Kingdom

We all know Rip Van Winkle, who takes a nap in the woods and reemerges to discover he’s been asleep for 20 years. When he returns to town, he notices many uncanny changes, but for the most part, life is much the same. For instance, his favorite pub still features its venerable portrait of George… it’s just that the George being honored is one “President Washington” instead of the King of England! Van Winkle observes the irony that his nameless wife having passed away while he was “out” has much more bearing on his everyday life than the Revolution could. 

Yet Irving also wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, in which Ichabod Crane and his neighbors are haunted by a headless horseman. So, maybe he sees a more sinister and terrible angle on how a “decapitated” community might develop a troubled subconscious about their lack of a crown. Who knows how soon after the Revolution people stopped even noticing our headlessness?  Maybe that’s a reach. What I do know is that it’s a tricky thing to talk at all about Kings and Kingdoms in these United States. 

Now, I’m not complaining. Many of my professors have been subjects of or members of universities that are subject to a Crown. Their difficulty is often in distinguishing the Lordship of Christ from their experience with human kings and queens. Most Americans don’t have the baggage of a people who’ve grown up in a monarchical government. But that also means that when we approach King language in the Bible, we arrive without any luggage at all. We struggle to imagine what exactly Jesus means when he calls himself a King. 

I’d much rather do some extra work in getting there imaginatively than try to re-establish a royal government on this continent. But I think it’s important to acknowledge this position we Americans are in, stirring up proper affection for someone claiming to be a King setting up a Kingdom. Even if it is Jesus, I wonder if we can’t help imagining his Kingdom by default as something of a Democratic Republic with an ideal President. 

Let’s try to imagine it better together this Sunday, 

Embody

I enjoy rollerblading. And I enjoy getting made fun of for enjoying rollerblading. So do your worst. I'm not that good at it, but I'm trying to get better.

There's a strange disconnect in me when it comes to rollerblading. I watch so many YouTube videos on how to rollerblade better. And every time I watch one, I strap on my rollerblades with 110% confidence that I can do it. If you ever want to see me fall hard, the five minutes after watching rollerblading videos is the prime time to do so. If I fall, it must be because I didn't watch enough YouTube or I didn't have the right wheels or the right socks or the right surface.

That same disconnect happens in many areas of my life, perhaps most often in the way I live out my faith. I walk out of the Soul Room with 110% confidence that I can do it. If you want to see me fall hard, find me in the five minutes after reading the Bible. My expectation is that reading good truths about Jesus or thinking good thoughts about the Gospel is enough for me to live it out. But the disconnect remains. I feel like the Apostle Paul, "Who will deliver me from this body of death?"

After years of watching this happen, it's easy to give up, to move towards apathy, or to think some secret knowledge can help us escape this fleshy prison. How can the truth of the Gospel go from my heart to my hands? How can I not only know the love of Jesus but embody it? May Scripture be our guide on this as we consider the word "embody" from our Lexicon this Sunday morning.

I was on the phone with my eldest son yesterday, and we were talking about a passion of his—frisbee golf. I called him to invite him to come to Black Mountain, North Carolina, where I will be at a Church Planting Conference. One of the things I do when I go to this conference is cook and set a lavish table in the evenings, an immersive experience in hospitality and a place for church planters to just be. 

I used frisbee golf to sweeten the deal, as many of these church planters are devotees of the game. His comment was what interested me, as I had just put the wraps on a sermon on discipleship. He said, “Yeah, I need to play with some guys better than me. I am sort of plateaued. YouTube videos are just not the same. I need to actually see someone do it right and who can point out what I am doing wrong." I said, “Yeah, you just described my sermon on discipleship.”

Abide. That is what Jesus said to his disciples. The word is rich in meaning and captures the heart of discipleship. To abide is much more than getting a little more knowledge, whether in a classroom or on a screen. To abide is much richer; it suggests dwelling with, being with, making yourself at home. It means a disciple spends time with, and is deeply attached in a loving relationship with both God and his people. It is a necessary corrective to the rationalism that endlessly chases more Bible information yet neglects the more difficult task of abiding. Interested? We will talk about it on Sunday. 

Last weekend, I had the privilege of participating in my nephew’s wedding. It was a cross-cultural event in many ways, as his bride is a Vietnamese American from a large and traditional family. I beheld with wonder the union, not only of husband and wife, but of two very culturally distinct households. Most of the wedding mass was in Vietnamese, and the day was filled with succulent foods, tea ceremonies, and exotic rituals I’d never even heard of. Often there was translation into English and idioms for the sake of us bewildered white southerners, and often there was not. Most of their overwhelming hospitality was nonverbal, but there was never any doubt that we were honored and valued guests and witnesses to another world. 

Toward the end of our celebration, the father of the bride approached, and we continued the chat he and I have been having off-and-on for almost a year now. He knows I’m a pastor and a student of culture and it’s been such an education for me to get to ask questions and bounce ideas off of him. But in this moment, the conversation had been fully eclipsed by experience. I had spent nine hours of full immersion, eating nine courses of unbelievable food, with his nine siblings and their own branches of the family. I commented on how elaborate and extravagant it all was, full of gratitude and awe. He poured me another glass of champagne, looked into my eyes, and then said something I will never forget: “There are no shortcuts to culture.”

This week, we’re talking about the word “covenant.” A covenant, as you’ve heard me say many times, is a promise that makes a family, where lonely people can belong and matter. It is the institution of a culture. For Israel, from calling to constitution to calendar, all the elements of God’s covenantal action toward His people are a slow building of a culture from generation to generation, culminating at last, in a final and glorious consummation. There are no shortcuts. There is only faithfulness. And it’s something worth celebrating. 

So, join us this Sunday as we step back and try to take in the better story!