Throne Room of Grace

Picture this scene… You have an audience with the King of Kings, and you find yourself entering his throne room, with high vaulted ceilings, incense, beautiful artwork, rich tapestries, incredible beauty everywhere, and then you see the throne! The throne! You have never seen anything like it! What an honor to be here!

The majesty of it all overwhelms you and you begin to bow your head and then you begin to crawl even before you see The King- and when you see him, in all his glory, you wonder how you even came to be in his presence- he is a blinding light, and beyond all human comprehension, and you know in an instant that you are in the presence of someone who is completely other! Someone whose depth and breadth and power and goodness and wisdom and love are infinite and unknowable. The whole cosmos was made by his hand and every breath taken by every creature who ever lived on earth came only because he himself breathed into them, into you, and me, and you are absolutely undone in his presence, and you can only close your eyes tight to keep from being blinded, and keep your face to the ground and your body stretched out in total submission, and you realize with terror that he sees you, right through you- he knows, he knows it all!

You are paralyzed with fear- your bones seem to melt like wax and you despair of ever doing another thing ever. You know that you are nothing and can do nothing about it. Suddenly, the light shifts, and the warm glow of it compels you to open your eyes. And you see the King, and he still seems terrible, yet, can it be? Familiar. His eyes dance with recognition… He knows you! He smiles and gently lifts your chin…. His Hand that made worlds lifts your face to his, and he laughs as he pulls you to your feet. He throws his arms around you and already he is moving, “C’mon,” he urges without hurry…”there are others!” and you find yourself with him, lifting others’ chins and rejoicing with them as they embrace the King.

The cross is the throne is the cross…. A King who comes from a blood-soaked throne to lift us up means that we can now act to serve him in freedom and joy, not fearful obligation. We don’t look at Jesus on the cross and say, “I feel terrible that my sins did that to him, so I am going to make up for it. Jesus deserves all my best effort to earn his trust back again. You’ll see, Jesus, I will do it for you, you are worth it. I’m so sorry, I’ll be good now. I’ll be sooo good! I will stand up and just do it!” No, true humility means you stay down, and in his presence. And HE will lift you up!

If you are not in his presence, he can’t lift you up! If you jump to your feet yourself, he is not lifting you up. Remember the scene in The Lord of the Rings when Denethor, Steward of Gondor, is on the throne. He plays favorites, he sends his son Faramir to certain defeat and death. “Father, Think better of me on my return…” “That depends on the manner of your return.” That’s conditional love. He is a poor steward and the opposite of the great King Jesus who exudes grace and unconditional love. We don’t trust that, so we try to earn it as if God were Denethor. We ride with misplaced honor to our deaths… either the death of separation from God because we feel unworthy so we give up because it’s too hard, or the death of Faramir, trying to earn our acceptance from our Father in heaven… Rather that we die the death of the cross, die to ourselves, die to our desires, die to our need to control our lives or deserve God’s love. Dying means we stay down until he lifts us up.

Moralism is close to grace, but it is back to back. Imagine being flat on our faces in that throne room, and then mustering our strength, jumping to our feet, on our own, so eager to please God that we turn away from his throne of grace and run to do things for him, becoming strong strangers to grace… it must break his heart to see us serving him with such selfish, fearful exactitude. Just like the younger son who came home and said, “Let me be like one of our hired servants” (Let me earn it all back!) The Father says, “No, come to the banquet of salvation, I have paid for it all!”

His grace lifts us up, and sets us free to serve. Then we see that we are all side by side, equal, lifted up together and lifting each other up.

Dance, Candice!

I am sad to tell you that our dear Candice Lewis died in the hospital Tuesday night. In my prayer time yesterday, Jesus came to me and his face reflected my own sadness. I asked him, “Why? Why was her life so hard? Why did she have to die the way that she did?” Jesus looked at me and did not answer, but his face said a lot.
He sighed and showed the pain he shared fully with me and Candice and her family and friends… but only for a moment, and then he gave me a look that said, “You don’t know her like I know her… She is lovely, and winsome, and really fun. She enjoyed much of her life, in the middle of her brokenness and pain, and she embraced life with passion and curiosity and courage. Her love for cooking, and soccer, and church, and friends, and her beautiful and simple love for her daughter- all these things shaped her joy, but they did not ultimately define her- I define her! She is my precious daughter. That’s who she really is. I died so that she could live forever!”
And then he shook his head and smiled and said to me, “Believe me, you would want to be her right now! You would give anything to trade places with her right now…you can’t even imagine the joy and the abandon with which she is dancing at this moment…”

We will all be dancing like that someday, along with all of creation, because God will put everything back together in perfect harmony. God calls us to be a part of that work. It can be excruciatingly slow for impatient creatures like us. I am reminded today of the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Let’s remember Candice by embracing our lives and our calling! Live to the fullest- become all that God made us to be! And let us renew our efforts to help others reach their God-given potential. God made us to be together, to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.

God-given potential is different from what the world values and calls success. Jesus reached his full potential- on the cross, sacrificing all so that we can live! He calls us to give sacrificially and he sees potential in our weakness. In the same way that he was perfected in weakness on the cross, he uses our weakness and fills us with a different kind of power, the power of his spirit, which Candice demonstrated. Christ shone through her and the world, much of it, could not see this.

Some of us got a glimpse.
Open our eyes, Lord to the beauty all around us, hidden in the weak vessels, disguised by our frailty.

I read this today: From Listening Hearts by Suzanne G. Farnham et al.
Learning to listen within our hearts may not come easily. We muse, Does God call ordinary people like us? And if so, to what? How can we distinguish God’s voice from all the other voices that clamor at us- those of our culture, peer pressure, our careers, our egos? Amid our secular lives, where can we find support for our calls? And how can we remain faithful and accountable?
Christians have always struggles to understand what God would have them do. In 1835, Soren Kierkegaard wrote in his journal, what I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know….The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do….What good would it do me to be able to explain the meaning of Christianity if it had no deeper significance for me and for my life?

So I made a short list of what I think I am called to do, in light of who God made me. How about you?
Here’s mine:
Enjoy God
Love my family
Love all others- build bridges in unlikely places
Exude Life and Grace
Communicate God’s Word in Drama and Poetry
Encourage and Teach others
Learn and Grow
Play and Rest
Use Prophetic Imagination
Do Systemic Justice

Make your list today. Let’s celebrate real life, along with Candice, who now knows what life is better than all of us put together!

We Have a Dream!

(Standing on a plastic chair under the 12th street bridge, January 30, 2011)
We stand here today together under a bridge of our great city.

A city with a grand history, two grand rivers, and some days, grand views of grand mountains on both sides of this fertile valley.

A city with a holy name- Sacramento. A sacred city, set apart for God’s purpose. And a city that is broken- part of a broken world with broken people, all of us, breaking the heart of God.

Sacramento is a city divided. By race, by culture, by money, by rivers…and freeways.

By people, like you and me, with divided hearts. Each one of us knows that the world is broken, and that our choices, yours and mine, have contributed to that brokenness.

The good news is that the One who made us is putting us, and our city, and the world, back together!

The One who knows us inside and out…and loves us anyway! Loves us enough to be broken himself, on a cross, so that the world can be put back together! And it’s happening!

God’s dream of healing everything will be reality some day, and that dream has become ours.
So, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., We have a dream today…deeply rooted in God’s dream for all.

We have a dream that one day we will rise up and live out the true meaning of these words,
“All people are created equal and are dearly loved by God.”

We have a dream that one day by the shores of this great river home-owners, home-leasers, and home-lessers will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood.

We have a dream today.

We have a dream that one day those locked up by an unjust prison system, locked out of future opportunity, and those locked up in a prison of their own addictions, will be set free to live and love and serve the One who fashioned each of them with his own hands and in His own image!

We have a dream that one day in this neighborhood, the children of Norteños and the children of Sureños, and all the other eños, will take off their colors, lay down their weapons, and join hands at the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ!

We have a dream today!

We have a dream that one day church-goers would stop their self-righteous self-salvation projects that isolate and insulate themselves from the pain of others, and that the followers of Jesus Christ would come down off their high horse, get their butts off their pews, roll up their sleeves, and get to work loving their neighbors in Jesus’ name!

We have a dream that this part of Christ’s body, Bridge of Life, will be an oasis, a place of peace and rest from the storm, and a training ground, sending those who love Jesus out into a hurting world.

We have a dream that one day “every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight,
and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together!”

Amen!

Into the woods

There is an ever-shifting maze of tents and campsites in the woods a couple blocks from our church, and not far from the tent city that became national news on Oprah a year or two ago. I know some people who live there, moving every week or two when they get notices from the park rangers. They don’t move far- just to another site in the woods. The only difference that I can see between this situation and the tent city is that this one is hidden in the woods, whereas the tent city was more visible in an open field. Out of sight, out of the news…

There are many different and fascinating people who live in this way, and although several of them seem very happy and self-sufficient, choosing to live in the woods, the vast majority of people here seem to live lives of difficulty and resignation. I have sensed a pervasive feeling of desperate sadness and despair; as well as a longing for healing and a remarkable attitude of sharing and caring among neighbors here.

There is addiction, theft, violence, trust, prayer, and neighborly love here in perhaps equal measures. It can seem a strange mix, until you think about how all those things may also exist in equal measures in other neighborhoods but just be hidden better, behind closed doors…

I often bring friends with me when I go to the woods, and my kids are learning their way around the place too. My buddy Roy came on one of my recent trips to the woods to bring groceries and visit with some friends. There were a few more dogs than usual, including some pit-bulls and one that looked remarkably like a wolf. “What’s his name?” I asked with some apprehension. “Wolf.” What kind of dog is he? “Wolf.” Gulp. Well, he was gentle enough, but not at all prone to tail wagging or used to any petting.

A woman that I had met a month or so earlier at our worship service came up to me and drew me aside. She whispered, “I don’t want anyone here to know my business.” She proceeded to tell me about her childhood as a Lutheran, her master’s degree in Philosophy, and her agnosticism as an adult. “If there is a loving God” she said, “He won’t condemn me just because I don’t believe in Jesus.” Then she said to me, “I want to tell you something- when I came to your church and you said you were going to preach on that one part of Psalm 29- the one about ‘The LORD is my shepherd’, I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be boring.’ But you broke it down and made it interesting, like I had never heard before. I liked it. But what really blew my mind was that you showed up here in the woods later that week. I couldn’t believe it. I blinked- I swore that I saw a rod and a staff in your hand, and you were going after your sheep, just like you said on Sunday. You were actually doing what you talked about, going after your sheep! I really appreciate what you are doing here to care for the people here in the woods, and if I ever go to a church, it will be yours.”

I know that intentionally inviting “homeless addicts” to attend one’s small church plant is not recognized as a brilliant growth strategy. Yes, many of these folks can be off-putting to others, to say the least, especially when they are high, or bringing dangerous dogs around. (The dogs are not allowed in our worship space- we had to make an explicit policy)

But if we really believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we must live the truth of His grace among all of our neighbors, and not just talk about it. So we go into the woods. The woods are right down the street and in another world. We all have woods in our neighborhoods. Where are yours? The neighbors you dare not try to get to know? The students in your school who are in a very separate group from yours? The co-workers who seem hostile to matters of faith? The ones on the street you have learned to look right through? Jesus is crystal clear in his call to all who would follow him: “Go into the woods.” Let’s go and pray that God’s grace will help us when we can’t see the forest for the trees.