Addicted.

I used to smoke.

Two packs a day, in fact.  My cigarette of choice was Salem Ultra Lights.  My wife told me that the menthol made my breath smell a bit more tolerable, and I could fool myself into thinking that because they were "ultra light" that they weren't bad for me. 

I enjoyed smoking a whole lot. 

The first thing I reached for when I got up in the morning was my cigarettes. 

I liked to smoke when I drove.  It passed the time and it made me feel cool.

I pretty much had to have a cigarette after I ate. 

I also lit up after... you know... "business time" if you know what I mean. 

Sex... for those who don't know what "business time" is all about.

You know, come to think of it I pretty much smoked to reward myself for all of the things I accomplished during the day.  Getting up. turning on the TV, drinking coffee, finishing an assignment...

I guess you could say that I was addicted. 

Every time I thought of quitting, I got anxious.  I would wonder what it would be like to not be rewarded for all of the things I did every single day.  What would it be like to just... do stuff? 

I did quit.  Finally.  It took several weeks of wearing nicotine patches, chewing lots of gum and eating.  I gained weight like a beast when I quit smoking.  Then I realized I had just traded one addiction for another one.

So I started working out every day at the gym. 

And then I got addicted to that (that addiction didn't last too long, sadly). 

And then I got addicted to online communities and downloading music.

And then I got addicted to my iPhone.

Maybe I should start smoking again to break the cycle. 

I actually had a hard time writing those things down even though I am so far removed from the struggle that surrounded them (except for the last couple of things).  Addictions are difficult to talk about--even with people you know won't judge you for having them. 

I asked a question on the sermon website for the Baggage Sermon Series about whether Church was a safe place to talk about Addictions.  I think that most people who commented on the site agreed that it should be a safe place, but not many actually thought it was. 

One person wrote this:

Church does not have the best reputation with me and I believe that is because of past hurts. Jesus calls us to accept everybody and not pass judgement, but not one person can say that they have not judged or looked at somebody different

I looked up Addiction in the dictionary. 

Merriam/Webster
addiction:  (a) being abnormally tolerant to and dependent on something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming (especially alcohol or narcotic drugs)
(b) an abnormally strong craving

There's another definition that is linked to the ancient Roman understanding of addiction:

surrender to a master;
a word used to describe justification for slavery

I wonder sometimes how many "Christians" come to church and sing songs about being set free from sin by Jesus Christ, proclaiming his as Lord of their life, but are secretly surrendering to some other master every single day of the week. 

I wonder if it's most of us.

But we don't talk about it, though.  Because it's not safe to discuss such things with the people who call themselves Christians, worshiping beside us in the things that we call church. 

The Apostle Paul, the greatest 1st century theologian, and the person who God used to launch a revolution of thought, word and deed when it came to following Jesus (really following Jesus) wrote this:

We know that the old way of being died with Jesus when he was crucified, and our old way of being died with him. But because he was raised from the dead, anyone who is "in" Jesus was raised with him, too.  So you are dead to sin, and the way it drags you away from a real relationship with God, and alive in this new way of being and knowing.  For this reason, you don't have to bow your physical knee, your physical body to another master.  Even your body has been redeemed and brought into a new way of being.              - Romans 6:6-14 (my paraphrase)

 All of those addictions that have tried to claim ownership over you?

They don't own you.

And the so-called Christians who would judge you and maybe kick you out of their little club for sharing what doesn't own you?  Well, the addictions they are bowing to in their private moments don't own them either.

Jesus doesn't judge you.

Being part of Jesus--following after him the best you can gives you a new life. 

Jesus redeems your past.  Jesus changes your present.  Jesus gives you a new future.

Religion doesn't do that.  Christianity doesn't do that.  Jesus does.

But it costs you, and you know it.  To live that new life you have to stop bowing your knee to that other master whatever it is.  Jesus told his disciples once, "Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it."  Sometimes the old life, the old way of being needs to be reminded that it's dead and gone.  We need to lose that life in order to find the real life that we've been given. 

Those bags that you've been carrying around.  Those bags of addiction. 

Leave them.

A New Kind of Brian McLaren

 

A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming Our Faith

by Brian McLaren (HarperOne, 2010).  

Brian McLaren has been under fire these past few years.  He's been called a heretic (one of the more kindly monickers), and been likened to the anti-Christ and/or Satan.  In his "friendly" note to his critics, McLaren offers this bit of advice to those who have attacked him for his ideas and thoughts on Christianity and the people who call themselves Christians.  "I repeatedly tell people, if they are happy and confident in your approach, that they stay with it and ignore me, my work, and my friends entirely. I am not here to steal any of your "market share" or do you harm in any way." 

Sadly, the vitriol and the hate speech that is leveled at McLaren almost exclusively comes from "Christians" and "Christian" leaders.  Having grown up in a fundamentalist Baptist culture, I am familiar with the fear-mongering that takes place among otherwise decent and upright people, who simply can't stand the sort of theological questions that would displace one of the many cards in the flimsy house of faith they have built.  They seem to forget that it was "Doubting" Thomas who actually got to touch the resurrected Jesus and have his faith made tangible.  Questions are necessary and right and proper for those of us who stumble after Jesus Christ, and for those of us who haven't yet started stumbling.  And it is to questions--ten of them to be exact-- that McLaren turns is attention to in his newest (and I would argue, best and boldest) book.  

As I began to read Brian McLaren's new book A New Kind of Christianity, I was struck by this quote that really (in my opinion) set the tone for what was to follow.  McLaren writes, 

"Paradigms and dogma can be defended and enforced with guns and prisons, bullets and bonfires, threats and humiliations, fatwas and excommunications.  But paradigms and dogma remain profoundly vulnerable when anomalies are present.  They can be undone by something as simple as a question..." (16)

 McLaren asserts that the "Church" needs to embark on a quest for a new kind of Christianity.  There are some who would see this as a betrayal, he notes, but he calls it "the most faithful kind of betrayal: a betrayal of the actualities of the past and present to seize the future possibilities toward which they reached." (18)  The ten questions that mark the quest toward a new kind of Christianity are as follows:

1.  The narrative question - What is the overarching story line of the Bible?
2.  The authority question - How should the Bible be understood?
3.  The God question - Is God violent?
4.  The Jesus question - Who is Jesus and why is he important?
5.  The gospel question - What is the gospel?
6.  The church question - What do we do about the church?
7.  The sex question - Can we find a way to address human sexuality without fighting about it?
8.  The future question - Can we find a better way of viewing the future?
9.  The pluralism question - How should followers of Jesus relate to other religions?
10. The what-do-we-do-now question - How can we translate our quest into action?

What is special about A New Kind of Christianity is the way that McLaren refuses to espouse either a progressive or conservative viewpoint on any of the aforementioned questions.  Instead, he borrows the "best" from both perspectives and charts a new way forward that is a both/and as well as a neither/nor.  This is refreshing in a culture where we are only presented with dichotomies when it comes to important issues, and especially important issues of faith.  McLaren also shows the folly of modern thinking and modern approaches to theology in what is quite possibly a post-postmodern age.  McLaren quite rightly states that there are so many people doing violence to the gospel of Jesus Christ under the name of Christianity, that it is time to change the paradigm completely, and to do so in a way that honors Christian tradition without idolizing it. 

I have to say that this is quite possibly, along with Phyllis Tickle's The Great Emergence, one of the most accessible of the emergent theological works of the past few years.  I would recommend it to Christians and non-Christians alike.  If we are going to find our way through the impasse that has been created by reticent and angry people of faith from all walks and all persuasions, this should be required reading before we take a single step forward. 

Rediscovering Values - Jim Wallis' New Book Provides More than A Moral Compass

Rediscovering Values On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street:  A Moral Compass for the New Economy, by Jim Wallis, Howard Books.  

Jim Wallis has never been one to shy away from tough topics.  In God's Politics he stepped all over the toes of politicos from the right and the left on his way toward higher ground in the American political conversation.  In The Great Awakening he called out the religious, political and commercial special interest groups that have long had a stranglehold on the way we think and talk about faith and politics as he envisioned a new way forward in a "post-religious" America. 

Now in Rediscovering Values Wallis prophetic voice rings out some hard truths into the canyons of Big Business, Big Banking and an often complicit Big Government.  Wallis is more than a critic, more than a simple naysayer--the kind that we so often hear on talk radio and pitted against one another on cable news.  Like his previous work, Rediscovering Values offers solutions rather than just pontificating on the problem.  But it's not as though the problem doesn't get some airtime in Rediscovering Values.  It does. 

Wallis intentionally peppers his work with Biblical imagery and language that would have been at home on the lips of Old Testament prophets, especially when he is pointing out the ways in which God has been mocked by our greed and replaced by false gods like the Market.  "The market," Wallis writes, "has become our 'golden calf' our idol of ultimate allegiance." (28) He goes on to say that "Today instead of statues, we have hedge funds, mortgage-backed securities, 401(k)s, and mutual funds." (29)  This allegiance to the god of the market was so total and so complete that we began, according to Wallis, to give the market godlike qualities.  It became "all-knowing, all-present, all-powerful, even eternal--unable to be resisted or even questioned."  He goes on to relate the story of the Great Recession:  the downfall of the mighty, the waste of cities, the betrayal and the disillusionment of a people. 

Rediscovering Values is more than a cautionary tale of what happens when a few greedy people are given too much control--it is the story of how all of us own our share in what happened to the world's economy.  And even further, we all own our share in what is happening to the Earth, to our souls and to the future our children will inherit. 

Wallis fills what could have been a very somber read into one that is filled with signs of life and visions of hope.  He concludes that in the end, if we all assume responsibility for the change that must occur in our spending, in our wasteful habits, in our consumption of resources that the tide can turn, that there can be redemption.  God spoke to his people quite plainly through the prophet Malachi, "return to me and I will return to you."  It is easy to hear those words echoed all throughout Rediscovering Values.  It is a great read, thoroughly engaging and what America needs to hear now more than ever.

 

Free Book: A Review

 

Free Book by Brian Tome - Thomas Nelson Publishers

Brian Tome is the lead pastor of Crossroads in Cincinnati and is also the author of Free Book his latest offering from Thomas Nelson.  Tome begins his book with a warning.  He declares that he is fed up with Christians who are living in fear, and not living into the hope that comes with freedom in Christ.  In fact, he is so fed up that he uses some strong language (to some perhaps) to make his point.  Tome then declares that there are things that he will say in the cause of Christian freedom that will give more than a few Christians pause, as well as a good many other folk.  Despite his warnings, however, Tome's ideas about Christian freedom are not nearly as controversial as the reader might be led to believe after reading the first few pages--unless a strong belief in the power of the the Holy Spirit and the fact that Christians are part of a larger spiritual battle that is taking place all around them is controversial.  Free Book is a practical guide to basic Christian beliefs--particularly those that have been laid out by none other than Jesus and the Apostle Paul.  Tome asserts quite plainly that the "truth" of Jesus Christ and what he came to earth to accomplish will actually set people "free" if they embrace a relationship with Him.  Tome's efforts to define Christianity in positive rather than negative terms is at the forefront of Free Book, and his point is very well taken.  This is a great read for new Christians, recovering fundamentalists or anyone who struggles with legalistic views of Christianity. 

Checking Your Baggage

 

I have baggage. 

I have fundamentalist Baptist baggage, as in I used to be one.  Basically what this means is that every time I sense legalism or elitism in Christianity, I get angry and defensive, and usually sarcastic.  

Oh, and I have poor self-image baggage--hence the sarcasm.   What this means is that sometimes I use sarcasm to mask my feelings of inadequacy and to make me feel better about myself. 

I have baggage when it comes to dealing with certain people because they remind of other certain people that I just can't stand to deal with...

I have baggage when it comes to being wrong, as in I don't like to be wrong and when I am wrong, I tend to internalize it and beat myself up for being wrong.  

I have some serious baggage. 

We all do, but most of don't really talk about our baggage much. 

And we definitely don't talk about it in church.  

I created a website for my new sermon series for Lent.  The sermon series is called "Baggage:  The Things that We Carry."  The website is HERE.  I capitalized those letters so that you would click on them.  I hope it worked.  When you go to that page you will see some answers to a question I asked about things that are impossible to talk about in church.  It will sober you a bit to read them.  It did me.  

And that's only the tip of the iceberg.  

My sermon this week is from Romans 6.  The Apostle Paul wrote this letter in the 1st century to a group of people who needed some instruction on what it meant to live into the hope of new life in Jesus Christ.  

This is what he said... in a nutshell.  

1. Jesus died to provide freedom from the tyranny of sin and death. 

2. Those who begin stumbling after Jesus are actually by some mysterious God-ordained way in Christ--which means they share in the life, death, burial and (can I get a witness?) resurrection of Jesus. 

3. Nothing of sin's old regime has any power over Jesus

4. And because Christians are in Christ, nothing that smacks of sin or death has any power over them either.  

Funny.  Most Christians don't get that.  

They think that Jesus died so that they could build really big monuments (church buildings) to commemorate their success and to "leave a legacy."  They think that Jesus died so they could pat themselves on the back because they are going to heaven and everyone else isn't.  They think Jesus died to create Christian radio stations, t-shirts, bracelets, wall art and crap to stick on the back of your car. 

But that's not why Jesus died (See #1 in the earlier table).  Jesus died so that there would be freedom from sin and death and when he was raised from the dead on Easter morning--he proved it worked.  

None of our baggage, our shame and our hurt has any power over us if we are in Christ.  It's time we took away the power we have given these heavy bags by setting them down, opening them up and tossing out the contents.  If the Christians who populate the inside of churches actually did this together, it would look like...  

the church.  

At least the church as God intended. 

Forgotten God - Book Review

The Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit   by Francis Chan                                I picked up Forgotten God a year ago this month at the National Pastors Convention that was sponsored by Zondervan and Intervarsity Press.  I am still grieving that this event was canceled this year because books were half price.  I basically blew my whole book allowance plus a hundred or more $$ on books that I am basically halfway through reading a year later.  Forgotten God is one of those books that I finally began reading this month and I was glad that I waited.  The timing couldn't have been better since I was (at the time I started working through it) preaching on the Holy Spirit to my congregation.  It helped to solidify some things that I was thinking and eventually would convey to my flock, and it opened my eyes to some new perspectives as well.  

Francis Chan is the senior pastor of Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley California.  He is an evangelical with a social conscience and possesses an understanding of how the Church, the Body of Christ must change and emerge from it's sleep if it's going to have any sort of relevance in our culture.  Chan's theological bent is the product of a strange mix of conservative, non-denominational, Baptist, mainline Protestant and Pentecostal backgrounds.  All of these have both formed and informed his understanding of the Holy Spirit of God and how God's Spirit is at work in the world and in the lives of God's people.  

Chan's essential premise is that the basic doctrines and beliefs about the Holy Spirit in the various Christian traditions have been sadly lacking.  It's either feast or famine, according to Chan.  On the one hand, those who adhere to the Pentecostal tradition seem to be leaning heavily on the freedom of the Spirit while on the other their conservative, evangelical brothers and sisters don't lean on freedom at all.  As a result, Chan believes that most Christians have a skewed understanding of who the Holy Spirit is, what the Holy Spirit does and why Christians need to feel and to experience the Holy Spirit.  

Interspersed throughout the book are stories of earnest Christians who have experienced the power of the Holy Spirit in their lives.  The stories are inspiring and do help to provide the reader with a real glimpse into what Chan is talking about at the end of each chapter.  

In the end, I believe that Chan wants to re-frame the doctrine of the Holy Spirit into a "both/and" kind of theology.  While he definitely sees the need to ground our understanding of the Holy Spirit in Scripture and to have a sense of what is decent and in order for the good of the Church, Chan also recognizes that "the wind [of the Spirit] blows where it wants..."  The best way to truly experience the Spirit of God in fresh new ways, according to Chan, is to simply be in a real and true relationship with God where it becomes much easier to see and to hear what the Spirit is doing.    

I recommend this book for anyone who is seeking some basic knowledge about the teachings of the Holy Spirit, or for anyone who feels that their spiritual life is a bit dry and barren.  

What The Dog Saw - Book Review

I recently completed Malcolm Gladwell's newest book What The Dog Saw: And Other Adventures. Gladwell is the wildly successful author of The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers.  What The Dog Saw is a collection of essays that Gladwell completed for The New Yorker over the last decade or so.  Gladwell's success in the world of nonfiction has been largely attributed to his ability to tell a story, but I believe that his boundless curiosity about the world and how it works is his most endearing quality.  For example, The Tipping Point asked the basic question, "How do movements, trends and cultural phenomenon begin and grow?"  Blink asked, "How do people make decisions...really?"  Outliers asked "What makes successful people, successful?"  What The Dog Saw is simply a series of the same kind of great stories and questions that make Gladwell's work so engaging. 

Gladwell wonders in The Pitchman what makes Ron Popeil, the CEO of Ronco and the TV pitchman of his invention, the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie and BBQ, such an incredible salesman.  He delves into the reasons why gourmet ketchup doesn't sell like gourmet mustard in The Ketchup Conundrum.  He even finds a way to connect feminism, hair color ads and cultural transformation through marketing in True Colors.  The title essay, What the Dog Saw is an essay that Gladwell wrote about Cesar Milan, the popular host of the TV show "The Dog Whisperer."  While there are plenty of essays that deal with some puzzling cultural questions, the bulk of Gladwell's work in What The Dog Saw touches on the troubling subjects of our time: economic disaster, war and terrorism.

On a personal note, I couldn't put this book down.  It's one of those books that as you read it, you can't help but go into the bedroom where your spouse is and regale them with all of the new-found knowledge that Gladwell threw your way.  I actually felt smaller after I read it.  That's how much I liked it.  Bottom line:  get this book, go do it now.  You won't regret it.