Clinging to Life

I don't want to die...

Great way to start a blog post, right? Sorry to be so abrupt, but this is where I am - 4:30am and contemplating my stubborn resistance to death. 

Death has always been a primary and powerful metaphor for my walk as a believer. I deeply believe that the only way to truly live is to die - to my comfort, my way, my sin, my agenda, my passions, my dreams, my longings, my hopes, my expectations, my ambition, my insecurities, my fears and my preferences. Personal experience testifies that death brings the real me to life!

This week, I went back and re-listened to a talk I heard last year by Cherith Fee-Nordling, who discussed death in the context of becoming heroic leaders. Even months later, I was shocked at the power that came through the computer as I listened and was reminded of this important truth. 

Cherith talked about how the Evangelical Church is always trying to rescuscitate itself. We cannot make ourselves pull the plug, no matter what glory might be waiting on the other side. Instead, we cling to the mediocre, the stale, the inadequate and the broken - because it's what we know. But Jesus came to give us our life back.

This week I am wrestling with myself and with G-d. But really what I am doing is prolonging pulling the plug. My struggling, discomfort and anxiety are all a result of me trying to resuscitate myself. I don't want to die. It is painful, true. But mostly, it is just plain scary. To die means things will change - the world will look differntly and I will be challenged to do things I never conceived.

Okay, you see where this is headed? I know what I must do...can someone hand me the plug...?

Christmas Makes It Personal

Over 2000 years ago, G_d put into action his plan to make things personal.

Ours is not a nameless, faceless religion that encourages hoping in hope in order to feel good or to bring order to our lives. Faith has an object. Hope has a direction. Our story is centered on the one true G_d...on the creator so big, I can't even bring myself to write his name anymore. And it is focused on this one who wants us so much, he made it personal.

He didn't set the world in motion, cross his arms and watch glibly to see how it all turns out. He took all the initiative to reach out and have relationship with us...and to LOVE us.

"I am coming to you...I am entering your situation, your pain, your joy, your relationships. your brokenness. I am entering your world to:

Set the captive free...freedom

Bind up the brokenhearted...healing

Release prisoners form darkness...light

Comfort all who mourn...joy

Provide for those who grieve...gladness"

  

These are not mere words, my friends. These are the points where the creator of the universe makes it personal with us. Where do you need freedom, healing, light, joy or gladness? This is where he interacts with us. If we can set aside pride and fear, disillusionment and doubt, we can have the greatest treasure of all...

a personal encounter with the one who knows us best and loves us most.

Church On The Patio!

I have often said how much I love the church. And I mean it. I love it in all its shapes, forms and mutations.

And, last night I found church in a most unlikely scenerio.

You might not call it church. We weren't in a church building, no one whipped out their bibles, and we decidedly drank too much wine. But, I think God loved what he saw as we had really great communion and encouragement in the Father.

Six of us gathered on the back patio until 3am talking about books, movies, our future, theology and gender issues :) In this small group, most of us are in our forties and we have lived a lot of life together. This intimacy allowed for some arguing, some conflict, some tears and some prayer.  Sprinkled throughout was the God-talk of people who want to draw close to God and make their lives make sense in his purposes and plans.

Jesus tells us that where two or more are gathered in his name, he will be there.

And he was.

Gender Fundamentalism

When I talk about gender, it is often in the context of the church and my desire that we find a scriptural basis for out ideas. But truly, the church has no corner on error. Check out this post about gender in our culture where Kimberly states that:

Secular culture has a gender fundamentalism as ingrained as the religious kind. The rules about masculinity and femininity that have too often been assumed within American history (or that are currently being dictated from popular movies and books!) seem to me as damaging as any dogma coming from churches.

If you can't read her whole post, be sure to read the discussion about gender portrayal in Twilight. It is so easy to brush this stuff off as irrelevant or extreme. But that thinking only goes to prove the point.

Faith or Fantasy - Hope or Illusion?

Today is the first Sunday of Advent - traditionally focused on the theme of hope. So I thought this would be a good time to write about something I have been thinking about for a few weeks:

What is the difference between faith and fantasy, hope and illusion?

I have been accused of being a blind optimist – of possessing a Polyanna-ish view of life that doesn’t jive with reality. I see it differently. I like to think I live with a godly hope and not simply unbounded optimism. When confronted with impossible looking scenarios I usually have hope  - for justice, reconciliation, repentance, healing, or transformation. I have an unshakable faith in God’s nature, in his goodness and faithfulness.

I also have a faith in his people and in his church. I have a belief that we can be a different kind of people. I don’t believe we possess an unrealistic perfection that has no room for our humanity. Instead, our identity takes into account our weaknesses and sinfulness but is overshadowed by the truth that we are Gods people – and that the truth of the Gospel can actually make a difference in our lives.

This has been severely challenged recently as I have watched people close to me struggle in painful and devastating situations. Families exploding, pastors falling, addictions running rampant – its just too much. One day I was sharing with a friend and, in my frustration, I think I used the word fantasy. Maybe my faith and hope and the way I feel about the church is all just a fantasy. My friend listened graciously and later, he sent me this:

“What is faith but for some unknown reason to believe in what we don’t see”

Needless to say, I needed this perspective - to be reminded that my hope and faith are not rooted in the circumstances of this world.  

The historical church understands my hope and bears witness to a faith that is not seen. To light the candle of hope on this Advent Sunday is to say to the world that there is something more than what we see, something bigger than our circumstances. Faith and hope may look ridiculous or fantastical to others, but they are grounded in the truth of an eternal God and in his goodness, faithfulness and love. Our hope is HUGE  - that God's Kingdom will break in and he will take what is broken in our world and fix it.

Where Do You Get YOUR Ideas About Gender?

A woman is feminine when she______________________.

Masculinity means a man should _____________________.

Now, look at your answers and ask yourself, “Why”? Why do you believe this?

Where do we get our ideas about gender? I often feel the need to stop and define the terms when the topic of masculinity and femininity come up because people are all over the map. Some believe that women and men have clearly defined roles while others believe that there is no real difference between the sexes except maybe a little biology! 

I am somewhere in between and appreciate where both camps are coming from.

Because patriarchy ruled for millennia, male characteristics were the standard by which everything was measured. The (traditionally) feminine was devalued at best and hated at worst. Misogyny ruled even if it was internalized. So to gain power and be taken seriously, some women decided the answer was to shed all constraints that resembled traditional femininity. Equality of the sexes meant that the sexes were the same. As Christians this extreme is unacceptable. I don’t know what the answer is, but I know that men and women cannot be the same. It is clear from scripture that God created us in his image as gendered beings. And if we all become masculine, the world misses out on his image being represented fully.

The other tactic women used to gain power involved elevating the feminine. If the feminine had been de-valued, it made sense to trumpet the feminine. This is what many women’s studies classes are all about. They try to get to the bottom of the female experience – the view of the world as seen by ½ the population. This relies on an essentialist view of gender that  believes that the female perspective is unique. They claim there are female ways of observing, analyzing, knowing and relating that have been overshadowed in literature and history books because men have had the power to name what is valuable. The goal, then, is to uncover what has been covered – to unearth the female point of view and elevating it to the level of masculine. The primary question with this is , "who decides what is essentially feminine?" We still have to acknowledge that gender is mostly a cultural construct and often arbitrary.

I don’t have any answers. But I am becoming obsessed with these questions. 

While I believe that men and women are different, I find little in scripture that goes to define masculinity and femininity. Additionally, I think I am just tired of the church getting in line with our culture and piling on expectations that that are not from God. We have a personal relationship with the creator of our gendered identity and we carry the freeing message of Jesus Christ - if anybody has a chance to get it right, it is us. And, we should certainly be a place where people can be free to really be themselves.

Devaluing the Feminine

Yesterday on the radio I heard some talk-show blowhard talk about the feminization of America. He was talking with such disdain, I could not believe what I was hearing.

Why use the word feminine to describe something he didn't like?

Same song…different verse.

Truth is we still esteem masculinity over femininity in this culture. This is the most subtle and insidious form of misogyny because we don’t often see it. Women as well as men routinely spout off a string of adjectives that they find distasteful; emotional, weak, clingy, needy, irrational. Forget for a minute whether these are even truths about femininity.

The clear message? Feminine=bad, Masculine=good. And, most of us carry around these sexist attitudes in one form or another.

Naomi Wolf talks some about this in “The Beauty Myth”, when she says the perfect body is associated with traditional masculine features; hard, lean, strong. We have systematically been trained to fear anything soft, round, squishy. We fear fat, despise our own bodies and routinely favor masculine over feminine characteristics.

This became obvious to me years ago and I vividly remember when I began to connect the dots in my own heart about this. After years of working with women in the Church I realized I was hearing the same sound bites from women lips; I don’t get along with women, I prefer the company of men, I have never had many women friends, I hate women’s events, women are so_______.

Do we hear what we are saying? “ I don’t like the way God made me as a woman.” “There is something inherently distasteful about the feminine.” Why are we okay with this? Why do we not challenge this in the church? We have the best chance to get it right – to help women and men think rightly about the other and ourselves.

Ohhhhhh…so much to say!

1.