Confession

I have a confession…my laundry room is messy. There are clothes hanging everywhere, and toys are all over the basement area you pass through to get there. I am sure this ruins your opinion of me and my family, but I want to go ahead and admit why I have locked all of you out of that corner of my life. It’s usually a big mess.

I’ve never been Catholic, and thus, I have never been to confession. But I have seen it a lot in movies and heard my Catholic friends from high school talk about it quite a bit. I must admit long ago I formed a pretty low opinion of the whole practice. I just dismissed it as nonsense that a man could speak for God about forgiving sins.

Now that I am older I think I am hedging a little on how sure I am that it is an altogether bad practice. In fact, I will say that we might just be better off if we had a confessional booth right here in the Springfield Church of Christ. We could get anyone in the priesthood of all believers to sit in it, and then we could all go about the Biblical command of “confessing our sins one to another.”

Better yet, though, we save the money on building the booth and just start confessing. The problem is that we are all too embarrassed to admit how messy our lives are. It’s like inviting everyone over to your house to go into your laundry room. I’m guessing your basement is just about as messy as mine, yet we all keep each other out of one another’s basements. It’s embarrassing, depressing, a reminder of things we are not all that proud of.

But what if we had a common practice of allowing people into the messy rooms of our houses? Wouldn’t that inspire us to clean them up? Obviously God knows all about your messiest rooms, so there is no need to hide. So why even confess something he already knows? Obviously, it’s because confession is not for him but for us. He knows we need to uncover all that stuff, confess it, admit it and quit pretending it doesn’t exist. That’s what it means to have a clean house in God’s eyes.

I don’t know much about Catholic confession, but I know it begins like this: “Forgive me father for I have sinned; it has been ___ years since my last confession.” How long has it been for you?

Mark

Submission

The literal translation of the word “Islam” is “submission.” In fact, if one reads some liberal expressions of Islam, we see them dropping the word “Islam” all together and using the English word “submission” as a replacement name for Islam. One website says,

‘Submission’ is the religion whereby we recognize God's absolute authority, and reach an unshakable conviction that God ALONE possesses all power; no other entity possesses any power that is independent of Him.

I think that most of us would say that “freedom” is one of the things we hold dearest when we think about Christianity. We highlight this aspect of our faith for good reasons. Christ certainly came to free us. Paul and others made sure we did not miss this, and they remind us continually in the New Testament of the freedom we experience in Christ. The references are too numerous to cite here.

Yet all this talk of freedom begins to make us think that “freedom” is the opposite of “submission.” This is not true. Freedom is the opposite of slavery. Freedom is the opposite of bondage. Submission is the opposite of what? It’s hard for me to even come up with the right English word…but the best I can think of is “being in charge.”

My point is that it’s difficult for us as Americans to think about submitting without sacrificing precious freedom. One of the things we see in our monuments here in Washington is the recurring, pervasive theme of freedom. We fought for it! We build monuments to it...and what happens when you build monuments to something? It’s easy to worship it.

Perhaps if we understand the difficult and counter-intuitive notion that submission and true freedom go hand in hand, we will experience the sort of freedom that God desires. Today we will talk about submission and what role it plays in the with-God life.

Mark

Being Students of the Game!

This week in the with-God life we look at how we’re to be devoted to a life of study. If we want to be more like Jesus, there must be a commitment to being students, learners, disciples of His ways and His words.

When I was in Uganda, I was part of a mission team that planted quite a few churches, and we found ourselves in a dilemma. We had to train leaders, and we realized an important part of training them would be formal study and learning of God’s word. We formed a training program called Basoga Bible School (BBS), and we instituted a curriculum. BBS is still going today, but it’s an interesting school because many of the leaders who attend BBS cannot read and write! The ones who can read and write are usually not “literate” in the same way that Americans might be. They talk to friends or listen to the radio to learn things. They are not illiterate but are largely “pre-literate”…or they don’t live lives that orient them to continually reading as you or I might be with our inboxes jammed with emails.

I’m not a very studious guy. I managed to make it through college by playing lots of intramural sports and then (secondarily) cramming at the last minute for whatever tests were required. I’m not proud of that history, but I might as well be honest that I am hardly the guy to wax eloquently about a life of study! But, the athlete in me draws me back to a phrase we always hear from TV commentators talking about sports. Whenever they want to refer to a particularly “smart” player in whatever sport, they almost always say something like, “He (or she) is such a student of the game!” What do they mean by that? Do they mean she sits and reads books all the time about dribbling or bowling or throwing a javelin? Certainly that’s part of it, but I would suggest that in a much bigger way they mean she is a much different sort of “student” than we think of when we normally use that word. They mean she is thoughtful, always watching, always eager to learn from what she sees the best of the best do on the field of play. She eagerly looks for and applies lessons to her “game”.

My point is that my friends in Uganda taught me a lot about being “students of the game”. BBS hopefully taught (and is teaching) them something about being students of the word. I think the cool thing about serving Jesus is that he is a living Word. We are called to not only study the static (but still living) word on the page in the Bible, but we are also challenged to watch His game (His life) and to imitate His moves, His techniques, His vision. May we be students of both aspects of the Word!

Mark

Pilgrimage

I’ve often thought how all the halls of fame in American sports are in crazy locations. The most famous one, the Baseball Hall of Fame, is in Cooperstown New York…not exactly a town where we find ourselves passing through the airport. The Football Hall of Fame is in Canton, Ohio, a town so obscure it makes Cooperstown look like Boston or Chicago. The Basketball Hall of Fame is in Springfield, Massachusetts, the home of James Naismith, its inventor. The less mainstream sports seem to have landed their shrines in even lesser towns: U.S. hockey--Eveleth, Minnesota; tennis--Newport, Rhode Island; racquetball--Gresham, Oregon.

The bottom line is if you are a sports nut who wants to get to a hall of fame, you have to set out to go there. It has to be a pilgrimage. You have to get in a car, get out a map, and journey to the holy shrine of Cooperstown or Canton or wherever. You ain’t gettin’ there by accident; it’s going to take some planning and some traveling….it’s going to take a pilgrimage.

My Muslim friends in Uganda understood very well the notion of pilgrimage. One of the great signs of true faith was whether someone had gained the name “Haaj” by completing the journey to Mecca at some point in his/her life. It’s the duty of every good Muslim to do it at least once, and that’s quite a tall order if you are an impoverished Ugandan and have no passport.

Certainly pilgrimages in other faiths can show us how dangerous and burdensome such “requirements” can be, and we should rejoice that our God made the journey, the pilgrimage to a foreign land, once and for all on our behalf. Yet there is an aspect to our Christian walk that is a pilgrimage. The idea that we are on a journey, not arrived, not settled or comfortable, is one that is evident throughout scripture. In fact, I would suggest a good portion of our troubles and woes in faith come when we think we have arrived and start building fences that God never intended we build. The with-God life is a life of pilgrimage.

Mark

Sacrifice

Philippians 3:8-9 - "What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ - the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith."

In that powerful verse in Philippians, Paul lets us know what he considers a winning formula for the game of Life. He says “If I can lose all things” I win the game. In fact, he calls all the other stuff “rubbish.”

This week we begin exploring eight ingredients in a “with-God” (Immanuel) life: celebration, study, pilgrimage, submission, prayer, obedience, confession and sacrifice. We begin with “sacrifice.”

Benjamin is studying great religions in his 5th grade class and this week had a test on Buddhism. I’m always impressed with Fairfax County’s schools because when I was in 5th grade, my knowledge of Buddhism extended as far as the joke “Q: What did the Buddhist say to the hotdog vendor? A: Make me one with everything!” (Ha!) According to Benjamin’s material, one of Buddhism’s primary tenants is that we all suffer, and that the reason we all suffer is because we all have “wants.” The more we can remove ourselves from “wanting,” the less we will suffer, and the closer we will come to some sort of enlightenment. (I know there are much more complex explanations of Buddhism, but the 5th grade version is a good place for my intelligence level.)

As Christians, Paul reminds us we are very strange people because we’re not about working towards a life void of suffering. In fact, we are people who are looking for opportunities to “suffer” on behalf of Christ. At first glance it looks similar to the Buddhists’ attempts to eliminate wants, but Paul reminds us it is more than this. We are consumed by a “want,” a desire to be like Christ! We sacrifice all things, not as a trade off to balance some cosmic energy, but so we can experience increasing enlightenment as Christ lives in us.

This week we will look at the first space in the with-God game of Life …the space that says, “sacrifice all you have.”

Mark

A Three-Dimensional Jesus

After nearly three months in the book of Numbers, it’s good to return to the New Testament and talk about Christ every week for a while. We will be looking at Christ in the book of Luke and focusing on his upward, inward and outward reach in life. As Martin Luther King reminded us last week, most people are content to concentrate on one dimension of life. He called it the length of life, and it’s the part that involves being a better person: better at our jobs, better at our various roles, more self-disciplined. It’s an inward focus to make ourselves better, and if we are not careful, we can become convinced that’s all there is to mastering life. It’s the stuff that most New Year’s resolutions are aimed at…losing a few pounds, getting more organized, exercising, etc.

Yet, there is more to life than just length of life, more than just an inward focus. There is an outward and upward aspect to life, too, which is crucial. We need to look no further than the life of Christ to see perfect examples of how a complete person might integrate those things. Jesus was amazing in how he was able to keep all three aspects in harmony…the inward, the outward, the upward. For the next several weeks we will be looking at Jesus in the book of Luke to see how he integrated these three aspects of life to be the most complete person who ever lived.

Mark

Daddy, Who is the enemy?

Over the Christmas break my family and I visited one of the most popular destinations in Washington D.C.—the Steven F. Hudvar Hazy Air and Space Museum. It’s an impressive place. The building opened in December, 2003, and provides enough space for the Smithsonian to display the thousands of aviation and space artifacts that cannot be exhibited on the National Mall. The Hudvar Center, along with another building on the National Mall, showcases the largest collection of aviation and space artifacts in the world.

Toward the end of my visit I overheard something that I won’t forget. As I stood in front of a Bell UH-1H Iroquois, one of the most effective helicopters ever created, I overheard a little girl ask her dad a question. She was probably about five or six years old. Both of them stood about two feet away from me. While holding her dad’s hand and looking curiously at the massive Vietnam copter, the little girl asked, “Daddy, what is that for?” With little hesitation, and without taking his eyes off the copter, the father replied, “It’s to defeat the enemy.” The little girl then asked, “Who is the enemy?” “Well, at that time,” the father explained, “it was the Vietnamese.” The little girl didn’t answer and they continued on to the next display.

I couldn’t help but think of how a Christian ought to respond to such a question. Who is the enemy, really? What does the Christian religion say about the identity of the enemy? Touring the Hudvar Center, one cannot help but be impressed by the incredible technological advances our country has achieved in the last hundred years. At one end of the museum was a small glider built in the early part of the twentieth century; a symbol of the simple achievements of the first aviators. At the other end of the museum sat a massive space shuttle, used to experiment with entering and exiting the atmosphere. It was surrounded by numerous other rockets, satellites, and space suits. The Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Sixty six years later Neil Armstrong is walking the surface of the moon. The rapid pace of technological advance is astonishing.

What is more astonishing is that, regardless of such a Herculean advance in military technology, human beings remain incapable of stopping human hatred. Hiroshima and Nagasaki may be the perfect example of how technology submits to the will of its creator. Unfortunately, technology is inhibited by the moral shortcomings of the human condition. Don’t get me wrong, technology maintains peace for millions each day, through the force of military coercion, and this is a political good. But technology cannot get at the root of the problem with human beings: it cannot conquer evil.

This is where the Christian view of evil provides a more realistic and nuanced account of what is actually wrong with the world. Unlike the father’s answer to the little girl, the enemy is a much larger and menacing reality whose defeat requires a power that military might cannot produce. The enemy is not the Germans, the Vietnamese, the Russians, or even the Wahhabi Saudis of the Middle East. The enemy, according to the Christian religion, is evil with its expansive kingdom of unruly characters: Satan the father of what is false, and the instigator and tempter of man; human persons, with their disposition inclined toward the domination of others and the exaltation of the self, barely able to see what is true and good. The children of evil are those who buy its program of lies and therefore become full of hatred and fear. Hatred and fear causes people to perceive their fellow humans as the ultimate threat. This makes us race to create bigger and better killing machines. If our country is to firmly grasp the hand of peace and justice, especially in a war on terror, the "enemy" must first be recognized as the evil that it is. This vice-producing evil is what we must speak of when asked by the little boys and girls, “Who is the enemy?” To not do so is to ignore the overall illness of man and treat its symptoms of hatred and fear as the primary problem

Matt