Word of Life Church Podcast

We inhabit a world of hurt. Pain is an ever-present possibility. Grief stalks us. This is not just true of people in third-world countries suffering deep, grinding poverty. This reality is not restricted to the victims of violent regimes in the Middle East. It is the human condition. Pain is no respecter of persons. It comes to us all. To take part in the journey of life, pain is inevitable and unavoidable. Part of our Christian hope is that God will someday lead his creation beyond pain. We have the hope of a world beyond hurt. But our present world is quite different. For now pain remains the price of admission into God's good creation. What we see in the Bible portraits is people who learned how to transform their pain. They learned that by grace we can transform our pain into a kind of grace: A grace that heals.

In the final track of the summer 2013 series, Finding God On Your iPod, Pastor Brian Zahnd examines the song “Show Me The Place” by Leonard Cohen. It is a serious and prayerful reflection on the Incarnation. If we drift too far into the realm of ideas and out of the realm of matter, we easily drift away from Christianity and toward Gnosticism. Christianity is an intensely earthy, material religion. God came to earth, not merely as an idea, but in the form of a man, with all of the dirtiness and pain that human life requires. God shares human suffering with us. He suffered sorrow, bereavement, betrayal, rejection, torture, and even death. This is the great scandal of Christianity: We worship a suffering, crucified God.

In the final Sunday morning installment of the 2013 edition of Finding God On Your iPod, the rock & roll foursome Alabama Shakes tell us that "you gotta hold on". Take hold of the life of the age to come... and hold on! We can't settle for the script of the old age; we must lay hold of a new way of being human. Jesus in his death and resurrection really did re-found the world. The powers and principalities with their ways and means of death have been overthrown. Believe that in the resurrection of Jesus a new world order has been inaugurated. Sometimes it's hard to see that God's new age has dawned, but hold on! The bitterness of death and the sting of salty tears is still with us, but hold on! The ugly specters of war, poverty, and injustice still haunt us, but hold on!

Our 21st-century Western culture prescribes consumerism to quench the thirst of our soul. The up-and-coming hip-hop artist Macklemore uncovers the fraud of such prescription in his track called Wing$. As consumerism is exposed, it leaves us wondering is there anything that can truly quench the thirst of the human soul.

Dave Matthews is someone who hungers and thirsts for justice. It's a theme that repeatedly appears in his songs. What Dave Matthews may not realize, however, is that the justice he hungers for is what the gospel is really all about. In the song Mercy, Dave Matthews sings, "Imagine that we could get it together / Stand up for what we need to be / Cause crying won’t save or feed a hungry child / Can’t lay down and wait for a miracle to change things". And in the song that immediately follows on the album, the recurring line is, "We gotta do much more than believe if we really wanna change things." We DO have to do more than believe and pray. But, we must believe and we must pray. We do this because believing and praying is how we are properly formed into agents of God’s mercy and redemption in the world. Jesus spent his time on earth in ministry changing the world as it was at that very moment. He did not have a focus of teaching people how to go to heaven when they die. Jesus insists that God actually cares about the kind of world we have. Jesus wants us to bring the will of God on earth as it is in heaven, right now! Between now and our death, let's try to bring heaven to earth. Let's multiply mercy.

In the song Demons by The National, Matt Berninger sings about wishing that he could rise above his depression, hurt, and pain, but instead "stays down with his demons". Emotions like shame and anger, lust and loneliness, are human emotions. But, improperly processed and left unattended, these wounds can become the breeding ground for demons, such as addiction, depression, violence, and suicide. Jesus never blamed people for their sins or for their demons. Jesus came, not to condemn people for their demons, but to lift them out! Alone, a person may not have the ability to rise above their demons. But a person can always turn towards Jesus. You don't have to stay down with your demons. Jesus can heal you and set you free from those demons.

If Blowin' In The Wind is a modern psalm of prophetic imagination, The Whole Night Sky is a modern psalm of lament. The idea that faith is a means of avoiding suffering is a big con. It is popular, but it's simply not true. Faith does not give us an exception from being human. Faith does not prevent pain and suffering. What faith does is enable us to encounter God, even in our pain, and give us purpose. Our purpose it to become fully human, like Jesus. Jesus endured pain and suffering, but transformed it into grace and beauty. Jesus' faith transformed an ugly crucifixion into the beautiful cruciform. We will either transform our pain or we will transmit our pain and hurt other people. Faith enables us to transform our pain from something ugly and destructive into something beautiful and redemptive. Jesus saves us in our pain and suffering, not by taking us out of it, but by sharing it with us. We are not alone in our pain and suffering; God in Christ shares it with us.

Micah the poet/prophet was living during a time of economic prosperity, but he warned Israel and Judah of pending punishment. While judgment was coming, Micah expressed his desire to wait for the salvation of God. Much of the Christian journey is waiting. Following Jesus requires more patience than power. While many of us hate waiting, we find that in waiting we become more like Jesus. Waiting is the work of prayer where we create space for God to be at work. Prayer, corporate worship, and small groups are all places where we can wait on God.

Pearl Jam front-man Eddie Vedder has quietly written and recorded a number of acoustic-driven songs over the last six years, songs filled with meaning and substance. In 2007, he wrote "Society" for the soundtrack to Into the Wild, a movie about Chris McCandles, a young man who lived life off the grid. Vedder captures the spirit of McCandles who said good-bye to a world filled with greed and consumerism. Jesus gives us a similar call to exit a world of wealth, a culture of consumerism, and a society of stuff. Life, according to Jesus, does not consist in the abundance of possessions.

The Grammy-award winning, Philly-based, hip-hop band The Roots collaborated with Monsters of Folk to create a prayer in the form of a song. The heart of the song is the ancient question, "Why do we suffer?" Through artistry and poetry, the song wrestles with the classic problem of evil, that is, if God is all-good, all-loving, and all-powerful then why is evil and suffering still present in the world? In confronting this problem, we are well served by acknowledging evil instead of ignoring it, praying instead of simply reacting, and looking for solutions instead of assigning blame. In the end, while we do not find explanations, we do find hope in the mystery of our faith: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.