Becoming Myself in 2007

“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light.”
Matthew 6:22

Hope that everyone had a wonderful Christmas and was able, in the rush and hurry of it all, to find time to treasure all the precious, both big and little, moments. I was reading the other day that Michelangelo once visited a quarry looking for the perfect marble. He found instead a block that was rather flawed but he took it anyway. He later said that when he looked at the stone he could “see”. And what he saw was the angel that this flawed piece would become. His task, Michelangelo explained, was to liberate the angel from the marble, by removing “everything that is not the angel.”

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

And so it is with God, and me, and you. God sees our many flaws but He also sees in us, His image. He uses our struggles, our ups, our down, our lives, to chisel away the hurts, the ego, the judgments, all the “stuff” that keeps us from seeing, that keeps us from Him, that keeps us from our faith, that keeps us from becoming who we were created to be.

“Faith is to believe what you do not yet see; the reward for this faith is to see what you believe.”
St Augustine

Two days ago, those of us who call ourselves Christians, celebrated the birth of Christ, who became like us so that we may become like Him; so that we may step out of our doubts and fears and step into the light of life and so that we might truly “see”. And so with the Christmas excitement in the rear-view mirror we look forward to yet another celebration, another “birth”, the birth of a fresh new year. And with this New Year, many of us will spend time making New Year’s Resolutions around “more, bigger, better”, but miss the miraculous truth that what you and I can become - we already are.

While I am not a big fan of the movie, I do love the story behind the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy, just three clicks away from Kansas had to first figure out that she was really home all along and “somewhere over the rainbow” was her own backyard. All that we need is found not in the destination but in the journey, in the life, that God has already given us but we must open our eyes, we must be willing to see, willing to become.

“And now, With God’s Help, I shall become myself”
Soren Kierkegaard

Ready for Christmas?

Are you ready for Christmas?

Seems like I hear that a lot now and suspect that you do too. The responses that I’ve offered and have heard vary widely and it seems the real question, more often than not, is have you got your ‘holiday’ shopping done? The last time that I was asked this was in Walmart to which I blurted out something along the lines of – “ I’m not sure how one gets “ready” for God but yes I am trying to spend more time in prayer and meditation on the incredible gift that is Christ”– I suspect they won’t be asking me again. I found it interesting to learn that in 1939, in response to retailers, FDR moved Thanksgiving a week earlier – to allow more time to worship you ask? - ehhhh, wrong answer - No it was to increase the shopping days before Christmas. And 67 years later the malls anxiously await the arrival of “black Friday”. And having seen many Christmas’s come and go I’m not sure where I got the notion that following Christ is safe or that Christians should play it cool and oh yes – be nice. Outside of venturing to the mall on Saturday some of us take so few risks with our faith that is no wonder people have a hard time believing in heaven and no wonder that non-Christians don’t see much looking in. We tell the world that there is life after death but the world seems to be wondering if there is life before death.

To paraphrase from the first page of Chapter 1 of the book “No More Christian Nice Guy” that my precious wife gave me:

What do you think would happen if Jesus were to appear at your church next Sunday and say to people what he says in the bible? “Hypocrites”! “White washed tombs”! “Fools”! “a brood of vipers fit for hell”

Yikes man!! I thought this was that Prince of Peace guy?? Sheesh!! We’d probably rush the pulpit, kick up the music to drown him out, and get the microphone out of his unpleasant hands. “Tsk, tsk, tsk”, we’d wag our fingers and remind Him of the importance of having good manners and especially good appearances in this “holy” place. I’m “fine”. How are you? Oh, I’m “fine” – everybody is “fine”. Back to this trouble maker, Jesus, I mean gosh, if you don’t have anything nice to say, Jesus, just don’t say it all….. and oh yes, I hope you’re ashamed of your performance young man!

In this day and age it is largely our “stuff” - our land, our possessions, our power, our money - that measures the success or failure of most of the “games” we play for most of our lives. For most, it is this material “stuff” that gives us our identity compared to which our identity in God is a relatively small footnote. We expect more from our stuff than from our relationship with God. We look at God through the wrong end of the telescope that helps us see a just-the-right-size God that we can get our hands around but sadly a reduced God is no God at all. We have become runaway trains with nice smiley faces (unless someone grabs that last IPod nano and then watch out!!). Brennan Manning says “The greatest cause of atheism is ‘Christians’ who acknowledge Jesus with their lips then walk out the door and deny him with their life”. And this is what our challenging and unbelieving world finds unbelievable.

“To want to admire, instead of follow, Christ is not an invention of bad people; no it is more an invention of those who spinelessly want to keep themselves detached at a safe distance from Jesus.”
Soren Kierkegaard.

We are not called to simply be candles on Sunday mornings, we are called to be fire, fire that purifies, cleanses and brings life. And so here we are with just 17 more shopping days before Christmas, the day on which we celebrate the gift of God becoming like us so that we may become like Him. Andrew Carnegie once said: “As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.”

We may preach all we like but the sermons that will be heard are the lives that we live.

Ready for Christmas?

Maybe…. on ordinary days

Maybe ordinary days are not ordinary at all
Maybe every day we are presented with a choice…
Maybe if we went looking for more to be thankful for we would find it
Maybe God provides minimum protection and maximum support
Maybe we missed the part about “on Earth as it is in heaven”
Maybe anxiety and anger are what’s left when we go blind to how wondrous life truly is
Maybe if you find God with great ease it is not God that you have found
Maybe if we are honest, sometimes we don’t really want God to be around
Maybe first we must do and be then we will know and see
Maybe the message of scripture is not that it happened but that it is still happening
Maybe we confused listen lord your servant is speaking with speak lord your servant listens
Maybe the reason why God lowers his voice is so that we will learn to pay attention


“The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”
G.K. Chesterton

From time to time all of us will stand at the edge of fear, of uncertainty, of doubt and of our faith, waiting to seek, waiting to knock. It is not how we start my friends, it is how we finish