Gratuitous Cat Post

We have three cats. If you don't care about cats, then there's nothing to see here. Move along, move along...

The cat thing started like this: We moved into the parsonage and that day, an emaciated pathetic yellow cat sat at our back door and meowed at us. I looked at Beth and said, "That cat is not coming inside, no matter how pathetic it looks." I'm allergic to cats. But that night, Beth couldn't find me--because I was outside petting the cat. That was on Wednesday. By Friday I told Beth I was taking the cat to the vet to get all the requisite shots to bring him inside. It took a year before my immune system adapted (my lower eyelids would get puss-filled; gross, I know). Turns out, he was the last pastor's cat who ran away when they started moving. Since being taken in, he has gone to great lengths to make sure he'll never be hungry again and has grown to be about 17 pounds (he was over 18 before we put him on a diet last year). That was Wesley. He's more my cat than Beth's. He purrs loud and hard and is just a sweet cat all around.

A few months later, our Lay Leader came to a church baseball game with a new kitten that she got from a litter her sister cat had--and there were still more kittens to give away. So we took one to be Wesley's friend. That didn't work out so well. We had to take Luther with us to Springfield when we went to homecoming because we were afraid Wesley might eat him. He used to be very brave and bold, but after a traumatizing incident with the mattress delivery men, he's the biggest scaredy cat (he was hiding under the bed and then they took the bed). He spends a lot of time under the bed, but will come out if you make him a cave out of pillows. Luther's a jumper. I've gone out to the kitchen in the morning and have found things left on top of the refrigerator knocked to the floor. He is thoroughly Beth's cat--not to say he doesn't like me, cause he does. But he LOVES Beth. He's very playful; he plays both peek-a-boo, plays chase, and does somersaults while chirping all the way.

I found Merdock last September in the parking lot of the church after a church council meeting. We were in the fellowship hall and I had seen him walk back and forth a few times in front of the glass doors. After everyone had left, while I was locking up, I saw him huddled in the middle of the lot. I walked up to him, scruffed him and picked him up saying, "What's your deal, little guy?" When I turned him around, I saw that one of his eyes was building out of his head and the other was collapsed in. My heart broke. I took him to the house and put him in a cardboard box full of litter. He staggered around and was suffering from diarrhea. Beth and I decided to take him to the vet to have him euthanized. Since it was his last night on earth, I gave him a can of the good cat food. The next morning we found that he had eaten nearly 1/2 pound of cat food (he wasn't any more than 3.5 lbs). He was a different cat; his waste was solid and he was coordinated and lively. We took him to the vet to find out about his eyes and to get him healthy. Turned out he had bacterial feline chlamydia that can be passed on from the mother at birth. The plan was to get him healthy and find him a home or take him to a no-kill shelter. Beth said that two cats was plenty, but I wanted to keep him. Since I was in school, Beth ended up having to take care of him, giving him his medicine and feeding him and making sure he was sequestered away from the other cats until he was curred of all communicable diseases. Then one night, after Beth had given Merdock his eye medicine, he crawled up in her lap and went to sleep. Neither Wesley nor Luther were lap cats at the time; this broke Beth's heart and I got to keep the cat. He maneuvers about the house as if he could see (When excited, he sometimes runs into walls). Because he climbs and can't jump to get up on things, he's built like a bulldog with huge shoulders and tiny back legs.

Turns out, Merdock was six months old when we took him in. he was just so malnourished that he was so small. When we took him in, he had a cat face, not a kitten face, and a full set of adult teeth. In the next three months he put on 9 lb. Merdock is the alpha cat. This doesn't make sense until you realize that cats establish dominance through staring. Merdock orients his head toward whatever he's attending too so he can hear and feel (with his whiskers) what's ahead of him. The other cats try to stare him down, but you can't stare down a blind cat. Plus, because his front legs are so powerful, when he wrestles with the other cats, they can't get loose--he latches on and bites their faces. He's our most playful as he has to be physical to really interact with us. He'll wrestle and fight my hand, and loves crawling up on us to nuzzle our faces.

The first two are obviously named after John Wesley and Martin Luther (we feed three outside cats, too, named Fletcher [after Methodist theologian John William Fletcher] Suzie [after John Wesley's mom, Susanna] and Sam [after John Wesley's dad]). Merdock was blind and had a tendency to jump [blindly] from heights (from your arms, the top of the washing machine, etc.). There's a Marvel superhero named The Daredevil: The man without fear. The character happens to be blind, and is name is Matt Merdock. So we named our last cat after the Daredevil, as he is the cat without fear.

That's the story of our cats. Hope I didn't bore you too greatly.

It's In You.

Jeremy Smith is talkin' 'bout this new thing called Seven Hills Theology. I get a bit freaked out anytime someone develops some new religious idea out of some obscure verse reference out of Revelation, but that's just me. It's what I would call--using Jeremy's parlance--a bad hack.

Anyway, this seven hills theology works like this.

To establish The Kingdom of God on the earth, we must claim and possess The Seven Mountains of Culture, namely: Business, Government, Religion, Family, Media, Education and Entertainment. - Jeremy Smith quoting a seven-mountaineer.

Now, I can see if you were one of those folks who thinks that God predestines some to be saved and others to be damned that this would make sense (those folks would be called Calvinists). The Kingdom of God would obviously need to be advanced by acquisition of power to subject the damned to the laws of the Kingdom of God. That way all the saved Christian people don't have to put up with the fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy,drunkenness, and carousing of those poor saps to whom God didn't hand out a free ticket to heaven.

If you can't tell, I don't like this perspective. At all.

Now, according to Wesley's sermon, "The Way to the Kingdom," the Kingdom of God exists within those who Christ indwells by the Holy Spirit. This goes back to the old notion that wherever the king is, there is his kingdom. Wesley believes both that God desires everyone to be saved by coming into a loving relationship with him through Jesus AND that free will has been restored to all people (by God) to call on Jesus for salvation or not. So rather than Christians forcefully taking control of the so-called Seven Mountains and imposing the Kingdom, God grows the kingdom person by person. And the Kingdom is wherever you see people living out the love of God exemplified by joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

I hesitate to use a consumerist-based analogy, but its a bit like the difference between a hard sell by a pushy salesman and viral marketing where the consumers advertise the product themselves because they truly believe in it. But The Kingdom is much more than a product. It's a relationship with Jesus that changes people from the inside out, 'cause if the Spirit of the King dwells inside of me, wherever I go, the Kingdom is literally at hand. Its not about taking control of the existing systems by force of will, and making it into the Kingdom of God, its about building a new Kingdom, person by person...relationship by relationship. And all are invited to be a living part of that Kingdom through their friendship with the King, not harshly ruled over by the tyranny of God's subjects.

Why Do We Go Home?

At the end of John's account of the Gospel, Mary Magdalene finds the tomb of Jesus empty and runs to tell the other disciples that his body had been stolen. When Peter and the "disciple that Jesus loved" arrive at the tomb, they discover that it is empty just as Mary said.

I have come to believe that "the disciple Jesus loved" or the Beloved Disciple is a multifaceted character. I believe that he may represent in some way the eye witness account of part of Jesus' ministry. That he did not write the fourth Gospel account, but was the bearer of the stories that were later recorded by an evangelist in what scholars now call the Johannine community. In other words, the Beloved Disciple is a true character in the Gospel account and a real historical person who was actually there. I do not think he is John bar Zebedee.

But more importantly, I believe that the Beloved Disciple is a null set. The evangelist is a brilliant writer and employs a vast array of literary tools throughout his/her/their Gospel account. In several instances, there are major characters in the Fourth Gospel who are not given names. In these cases, the reader is drawn directly into the story, invited to put himself or herself in the place of the unnamed character, be it the Samaritan woman at the well or the man born blind, An argument can be made that the same goes for Lazarus and Nicodemus. These null set characters can be played like Mad Libs, inserting your own name into the story. So what happens when we become the Beloved Disciple?

First, we find ourselves reclining on the chest of Jesus as he shares his last meal with the disciples before his crucifixion. Next we find ourselves at the feet of Jesus on the cross, as he tells us that his mother is now our mother. Then we find ourselves running to the tomb to discover that it's empty.

Then we go home.

There's no wonder, no excitement. Not even fear or confusion or depression. We see something amazing and then we just go home. They say that every Sunday is a little Easter where we celebrate the fact that the tomb is empty, but then when the service is over (and it better be before noon), we all just go home. Sure, the tomb is empty, but our reaction is more like someone has stolen the body rather than Jesus has been resurrected. And so we go home. We go back to our lives as if nothing is different.

Sure, Jesus shows up in the upper room that evening and again a week later, but again, nothing changes.

The next time we find ourselves in the place of the Beloved Disciple, we're on a boat fishing when the miraculous occurs. Why is it only now that we see the risen Christ? What can move us, like the Beloved Disciple, to tell the story of Jesus to others?

What gets lost between seeing the empty tomb and sharing the story of salvation? What sort of miraculous catch do we need to experience before we follow Jesus? Why do so many of us that call ourselves disciples just go home?

Friday Five: Soon and Very Soon.

You can play here: Friday Five: Soon and Very Soon.

Please share five ways that God has come to you (your family or friends, your church or workplace, our world) in the past year, that God is coming to you right now, and/or that you are longing and looking for God to come.

1. The most significant way God came to me this year was at the ending of a 18-month-long dark night of the soul. What that is, is a period of spiritual darkness where one has no sensation of the presence of God. Prayer seems pointless; it feels like no one is listening and, naturally, no one is responding. Communion is just bread and grape juice. Sermon writing and preaching seems mechanical. And so on. Its not a fun place to be, but like anything we strive against, it is a spiritually strengthening place.

So, I'm sitting on the couch in my office reading A Second Resurrection by Bill Easum for my evangelism class. Then out of the blue, I physically/spiritually felt the full weight of all my sins upon me. It knocked me off the couch to the floor--I couldn't breathe. Then a began to sob. Not crying, but body shaking sobs of pure despair. And in the midst of all that pain--in the midst of 18 months of spiritual loneliness, I cried out to Jesus for help. To save me. To show me what he wanted me to do. And just like that, the weight was gone. I felt it lifted off of me, and my soul was borne up within me. It was my Aldersgate experience. Just as Wesley expressed in his journal, I too ,"felt I did trust in Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death."

2. A week or two before my Adersgate experience, I had a vivid dream in which I believe God was preparing me for that event. I remember being in the ocean between a large ship and an iceberg. On top of the iceberg was a friend of mine from seminary, Chris. He kept talking about sharks being in the water trying to panic me, but I assured him that the water was too cold for sharks (Though deep inside, I was really panicking about what might be under the dark waters that could eat me.) Then he fell from the top of the iceberg and sunk into the water. I went after him, sinking quickly to save him, but when I got to him, I kept sinking faster and faster into the cold and dark.

I think that the towering smooth side of the ship and the enormous looking iceberg represented all that I had in my life that was insurmountable. There would be no way I could climb out of the water by myself to safety. So I was resigned to living miserably in the cold dark waters. Chris represented myself; he voiced all my fear, and panic and anxiety, while I tried to keep my cool. But when he fell into the waters, I feared losing myself. The state of fear in which I lived was horrible, but comfortable in its familiarity. Therefore, I sunk after him to save him. But then I went deeper and deeper, unable to save him or myself. I think the water was strongly representative of baptismal imagery, of dying to oneself. God was also present in Dr. Elaine Heath who helped me interpret this dream.

3. This summer, after worship at St. Anne's Cathedral in Belfast, Ireland, our group toured the Crumlin Road Gaol (Jail). I won't go into it here, but it was a truly haunted place; it was a summation of all the pain and suffering and evil the hung over the island like an ominous storm cloud. It left me a spiritual, emotional, and mental wreck. After eating dinner at Dr. Abraham's Belfast home, we went down the street to a small Presbyterian church for evening worship. There was so much life in that place as we worshiped. I was filled with joy in the midst of all the despair. In the course of the service I remember this scripture: Micah 7.

4. At the same time Perkins School of Theology opened its new facilities, which includes an outdoor prayer labyrinth, God lead me to discover the Rosary. This past semester, I have spent every day that I am at school walking the labyrinth and prayer the Rosary. I can do this in part because I am a lousy Protestant (but I'm still Protestant because I'd be a lousy Anglican, let alone a Roman Catholic). I balk at a lot of the Marian theology, leaving out the mysteries that I cannot support scripturally. I modified the Rosary to accommodate my particular spirituality. I still pray the initial Hail Mary prayer, but I replace the subsequent Hail Mary prayers with the Jesus prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Mary, have mercy upon me, a sinner." I add the praying of the Nicene Creed and Wesley's covenant prayer. But what it has done is strengthen my prayer life, by giving me structure for my ADD riddled mind and drawing my entire body into the discipline of prayer.

5. Every day I experience God through Beth. In her is the closest I have ever been to the grace of God's unmerited grace. Our relationship is the means of grace by which God has enacted the greatest amount of positive change in me. She loves me even when I deserve it the least. She doesn't let me get away with being anything less than growing into the person God is calling me to be. She's shown me what it means and what it looks like to love like God loves.

Fear is for Chumps

I've been preaching through John Wesley's 44 sermons. I read them through twice, picking them apart paragraph by paragraph and summarizing each, filling the margins of the Big Blue Book of Wesley Sermons with my scribbles. Then I exegete the primary text (ans surrounding text) that he bases the sermon upon. Once I've done all that I write it all down in quick notes on a yellow legal pad. Then I put it all together in using my own particular speaking style, illustrations, and observations.

YAWN.

(Just wanted to letcha know I'm neither plagiarizing nor reading JW's from the pulpit.)

Last Sunday I preached from Romans 8.1-8 and sermon 8, "First Fruits of the Spirit". I did something along the lines of talking about dancing with a partner or something like that (it wasn't good). Since I had been writing papers all week, pulled an all-nighter Friday, and played Santa on Saturday, I had little time to put quality work into refining the sermon. I relied heavily on my manuscript and just got plain lost while speaking due to shear exhaustion (I can't wait for the day where I don't have to try to preach in the midst of taking finals). I thought it was crap.

Afterward, I had four people (out of 26 in worship) thank me for the sermon. At first, I did the typical, "It was all the Holy Spirit, cause I just wasn't with it this morning," shtick. But now that I've had time to think about what I had preached and what others had said in response, I think I know what's going on.

One of the things Wesley hits hard in "First Fruits of the Spirit" is what it means to not be condemned for sins because of one's relationship with Jesus. The short of it is this: If we are forgiven, there is no punishment. If there is no punishment, we have no rational cause for guilt. If we're not guilty, then there's nothing to fear. And that past part is what did it for people.

How many Christians go through life afraid of sin? Worried about damnation and hell? Not assured of their salvation? Worrying if they had ever committed the unforgivable sin? Thinking they have to be prefect? From the reaction of folks at church, probably more than I can imagine. Now, I'm talking about people who earnestly do not want to sin, who attend to it in their own lives frequently, who try to avoid both inward sins of the heart and outward sinful actions, both of commission and omission. But sometimes we start to get that mentality that our slavation is dependant on our own actions. This can become quite stressful when you begin to realize how much we can sin due to our own ignorance, because of situations that we find ourselves in, or just because we're surprised by our own humanity. Jesus simply doesn't hold us accountable for honest mistakes and things that are out of our control.

Yet Wesley, always the pragmatist, reminds us that we're not to try to take advantage of this fact. Willful sins are what break our relationship with God--and willful neglect. A serious athlete who misses a point or is outperformed by another athlete or makes a mistake due to equipment or environmental issues can be surprised by their failing. A dutiful musician who misses a conductors cue or miss-keys a note can by startled by their error. Its not their fault that they made a mistake any more than its someones fault for feeling hungry, thirsty, sick, or lonely. But if the athlete skips practice, eats poorly, and doesn't work out--if the musician doesn't practice techniques, misses rehearsal, and doesn't maintain his or her instrument--then those mistakes are on his or her head.

You see, we get in trouble for willful mistakes, by our actions or by the fruits of our intentional neglect.

What was refreshing to those folks was this: If you trust that Jesus forgives you and makes things right between you and God, then you're not condemned for your sins. As long as you're human being you're gonna be prone to sin, temptation, and mistakes. You don't have to worry about the eternal consequences as long as you're putting forth genuine effort.

Reminds me of the immortal words of Jules Winnfield, "The truth is...I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm trying real hard to be the shepherd.