To Be Honest

My opening remarks on this blog were that I would not always be right, but I would always be honest. I think the word "honest" means different things to different people, and it's usually some variation on a theme of transparency.

The reason I usually don't like most blogs is because they are too "honest." I used to write blogs in high school that were like that; my friend Jimmy calls them "verbal masturbation," which is a gross but strikingly accurate summary. Every nasty thought about someone you ran across today or every insignificant thing that annoyed you or every temporary panic attack over misplacing your cell phone or keys.

People need to be straight with each other and we have to be willing to be vulnerable, but does that mean we need to be so utterly transparent?

Blue Like Jazz has this revolutionary idea where a bunch of Christians get together during an all-campus festival of debauchery and drunkenness and set up what they call a confession booth. The trick was that they were confessing to the students at Reed the sins and shortcomings of the church: the failure to be open and loving, the failure to feed the poor and comfort widows, and so on. And it wasn't a gimmick to trick the student body: it was a legitimate attempt to be candid, sincere, and transparent. Was it refreshingly honest or was it a misplaced endeavor?

I went to a campus ministry winter conference seminar where the speaker posed the question of what the consequences would be if all of our sins were broadcast on the campus radio every morning. I don't remember where the thought was going because I was stuck thinking about that idea. At the time, I thought it was the most incredible idea I'd ever heard. And really, when you talk about honesty in terms and scenarios like these, you have to consider the effects for two parties: yourself and the audience. For myself, I thought how humbling and convicting it would be to be held accountable not only by the people I chose to confide in, but by the attention of the campus at large. And how it would instantly negate my precarious hold on silly things like reputation and cool factor. And for the people who would hear it, well! They would hear and understand that I was also privy to sin and failure, but that I was also redeemed by the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ! Isn't that why God chose to use us broken people as His ambassadors? Clearly, the only thing holding back the body of Christ at large from using this transparent approach was utter cowardice!

I used to be a member of an evangelism team, constituted by a committee of five or six upperclassmen at Rice. The goal was to optimize how our students and resources were being used to reach the campus at large for Christ, and our meetings would have a lot of heated back-and-forth discussions about a number of fiery issues. At one point, I thought, wouldn't it be great if any given student could sit in on these private meetings? They could hold us accountable if we had an irrelevant idea or notion. They would see how much we cared about and labored towards their salvation and see our faith in a God who would make it so.

I'm no longer convinced that utter transparency is a good thing, for us or for the audience.

We were naked once upon a time, but in this fallen world, God ordained that we cover up our privates.

I think back to when I first learned the term honesty, around first grade or so, and the teacher or my mom said that to be honest is to tell the truth.

When you look at a blog rife with the messiness of petty details, unfounded conceptions, and desultory emotions, you may think of transparency, but you don't think of truth.

Jesus calls Himself the Truth. He speaks definitively of Light that shines and pierces through darkness. He declares that when men know the truth, the truth shall set them free.

Truth is more than you find in the average daily blog post, and it's a better thing than you would hear if my sins were broadcast daily over the radio. Because all you would hear then is a partial truth (that I'm a sinful person) and not the rest of it (the truth of Jesus's mysterious grace and salvation).

When Darth Vader tells Luke, "Search your feelings, you know it be true," it seems like Luke's confused, pained feelings are the worst place to search for truth.

And the truth is that when you ralph up a confession of your dirty laundry and innermost thoughts to most people, they're not going to respond well. They're going to say, why did you think it would be a good idea to tell me that nonsense?

The truth isn't what you're feeling at a particular point in time. The truth is unshakably Jesus. So we should add discernment and discretion to temper our notions of honesty and transparency. How many proverbs can you find where it tells you to keep your mouth shut?

I do think that most people should be more honest and more vulnerable. We do need to connect with people heart to heart, and we do need to reflect God's redemption in a meaningful, sincere way. We shouldn't pose or hide. We don't need to pretend that we don't have dirty laundry, but decidedly, we should be professors (we should profess) of Jesus's purifying love.

The Search for a Church

Every new Christian, and especially those who come to faith after a certain mature age, comes to a point where they question why we worship communally if this Christian life is supposed to be about an individual's personal relationship with God. If in the end, this Christian walk is about me and God, then why the integral role of other people? What can I gain from going to church, when in this information age, I can access sermons and hymns and concordance references instantaneously from my own living room? We preach that God pursues our hearts, that He abhors legalism and that at the end of days, He won't be touting the statistics of our church attendance or whether we wore a tie on Sundays. And if we really believe that, shouldn't zero church attendance be a legitimate option?

We certainly can't spend life in a vacuum. Our growth will be stunted. We will not have the opportunity to love and be loved, and all that Scripture and its truth will remain an abstract and a nice set of ideas if we don't spend our lives around people, dealing with the messiness and vulnerability and beauty of life in Christ. That's why most of the commandments and guidance we get from the Bible is about how to deal with other people. Spending our lives studying Scripture by ourselves is about as safe, confining, and lonely as it sounds. So much for the living room Christian community of one.

By and large, I didn't go to church throughout my undergraduate years. My rationale was that I had everything a church could offer with my campus ministry. I was being fed spiritually, and I had a role where I was feeding others. I had strong fellowship with other believers, in a Christ-centered community of college students. I had a weekly opportunity to worship and pray corporately, and different ministry opportunities that more or less encompassed what I could've done at a church. I connected with my brothers and sisters in Christ: they encouraged me to grow in the Lord, and I did the same, and I think that's what church is all about.

People kept telling me I needed to join an actual church, but I never saw the reason why, and I still really don't see that I should have. But it might've made it easier for the hereafter.

I've been church-shopping for several months now without finding one that I've really liked. And it's made me stop and wonder whether I just haven't found it yet or whether I need to revise my search criteria. What church really is supposed to be.

I've never liked people who put a lot of meaningless criteria on what makes an acceptable church. "I can't go to a church that plays that contemporary Christian music." "Oh, I really don't like large churches. They're so impersonal and they don't care about you at all." "I don't like the way they elect their deacons." "Why don't they have a homeless ministry?" In the end, I like to think that what I'm looking for is a first: a good, strong, loving, encouraging community who is in love with Christ and who love other people well, and second: solid, challenging, relevant Biblical teaching. I like to think that I'm not picky or partial about the other trivialities of whether they make you wear a tie or whether they prefer King James to NIV.

It's hard to tell whether the places I've found have fallen short of those criteria or whether I've inadvertently appended other criteria to my list of two.

I haven't found a place where I've felt the teaching is intelligent, challenging, and solidly Biblically based. I suspect that the Baptist churches I've mostly been attending have strong roots in storytelling rhetoric in sermons, and a lot of their stories have made no sense or don't really follow from the passages at hand. I think I really just want a pastor whom I think is smarter than me. It might relate to why I skipped so many classes in college.

I haven't found a place where most of the congregants are under the age of sixty. Is this concern legitimate because I haven't found people I can really relate to or is it trivial because I'm concerned with the comfort zone of people in their 20's?

I haven't found a place where everyone didn't love the acting of Kirk Cameron, especially in Fireproof. I saw Left Behind. As much as I would love to root for evangelical film, it was excruciatingly bad. I know it's a picky little thing, but I really want to find people who agree with the obvious reality that he is not a good actor.

I'm sure in some respects, it's like a relationship, where after a certain point, you have to grow to love something for its beauty in spite of some misgivings and flaws. "The church is a whore, but she's my mother," right, Augustine?

In short, I haven't found a place I want to return to, and I'm wondering if I'm looking in the wrong places or if I'm looking wrongly at places.

I think back to the books in the New Testament, of the early days of church-founding, where former fishermen and tax collectors traveled itinerant from community to community founding congregations that were hungry for Jesus and struggling to come up with some sort of order and discipline for their corporate faith. I imagine that a believer back then would have had to settle for his local Christian community, made up of widows and orphans and beggars and scholars and masons and carpenters. I imagine that they rejoiced in the love of the Father and in each other.

And only in America today do I have this vast array of churches from which to choose. It wouldn't even be an issue in Zimbabwe or Myanmar. But I do live here and now. I do have a vast array of options before me, and that means I should take the decision seriously. The very phrase "church-shopping" makes the holy Bride of Christ sound like an automobile with various features I can choose by preference. I hate the caprice and irreverence of my approach. My search may change direction, and it continues.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Pre-Marital Counseling

Grace Bible Church's pre-marital counseling questionnaire form is 13 pages long, and that's just the questions. So it's been a long process filling out this incredibly long form with very introspective and profound questions. After a while, I started having fun and being myself again:

What brought you to the decision to want to be married? I want a male heir and she by all accounts is fertile and of child-bearing age.

Have you in the past or are you now living with your fiancée? She lives in my heart.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm too irreverent for my own good, but I never wonder about that very seriously.

Shalom Yerushalayim

I think we're all losing the war in Israel.

900 Palestinians and 13 Israelis killed so far. Some of them civilians, some of them children.

In Iran, the Ayatollah has promised heavenly rewards to anyone killed fighting on the Palestinian side. They've also started burning effigies of Obama before he even takes office. Many Iranians blame the United States for not intervening. But if you're going to blame the cops for not protecting you, aren't you recognizing the moral and practical authority of the cops, and if you recognize that, shouldn't you stop burning pictures of them?

It's hard to form an informed opinion because it's hard to know what information and statistics to trust. Reports from Gaza? Whose reports? A Western journalist? An Israeli doctor? A local community leader?

Obama makes a good point: "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything in my power to stop that."

It's also a significant point because both sides are launching missiles right now.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't be concerned with who is right and who is wrong, and who started it and who should end it. That's important. Most of my friends support Israel, both from patriotic and religious loyalties, and I agree that God has always loved Israel, ever since the faithfulness of Abraham. But supporting Israel doesn't mean that everything her government does is morally defensible or God's will. It doesn't mean that war isn't terrible. And the fact that Palestinian rockets have devastated Israeli homes doesn't mean we shouldn't weep for the death of Palestinian children any more than Israeli missile strikes preclude us from praying for the peace of Jerusalem.

My point is that even if we're called to stand by Israel, we don't have to give up the cause of humanity. Humanity is God's cause, His magnum opus, the apple of His eye. The attack on His people surely must anger God, and surely there is a cause of holiness and righteousness that accompanies a necessary war, but the result of our sin, the ensuing war, must surely grieve His heart with each death of a beloved creation.

I'm not a pacifist. I believe that sometimes you have to kill people and break their things. But it's still a terrible thing.

The problem isn't Palestinians, and it isn't Israelis. This conflict is just a local manifestation of the fact that in the bigger picture of creation and sin and consequences, the problem is us, you and I.

Zechariah

Desultory thoughts on reading through Zechariah the second time. If you are reading this entry, be forewarned of my lack of organization here.

Lots of visions and prophecies that are difficult to place or interpret. One clear Messianic prophecy about a forthcoming Man whose name is BRANCH, who is to build the temple of the Lord and rule from His throne their as priest of the Lord.

It's interesting that we think of Jesus in the role as Savior so often and yet never consider what it means when the Old Testament calls Him a priest.

An interesting historical point is that the name "Jesus" is a Greek word that derives from the Hebrew "Yeshua," which both means "salvation" and is itself a derivation of "Yehoshua," which in the modern language translates to "Joshua." In other words, there's strong evidence that the names "Jesus" and "Joshua" were heavily related and possibly even interchangeable. What then do we make of Zechariah 3? In Zechariah 3, Joshua the high priest is shown standing before the Angel of the Lord. Already, the image is confusing theologically because both the Angel of the Lord and Joshua from the Old Testament are considered by many circles to be foreshadowing manifestations of Christ. Joshua the high priest is first clothed in filthy garments as he stands before the Angel, and the Lord commands that his filthy garments be stripped away and replaced with rich robes and a clean turban. And then the Lord promises Joshua the high priest that if he walks in His ways and keeps His commands, then he will judge the Lord's house and have charge of His courts.

Seems like Joshua here, who may not be linked to Joshua the son of Nun, is a pretty clear visual representation of a coming Messiah's restoration from filth to glory.

It's also relevant to note that in this text, the Angel of the Lord and the Lord are used interchangeably. I've always wondered about the capital letter Angel of the Lord, whether he is an angel with special authority or whether He is an incarnation of the Lord. Texts like Zechariah seem to indicate the latter, and a lot of people jump to the assumption that it's Jesus by another name, but what precludes the Angel of the Lord from being a fourth person of God, upgrading the paradigm from Trinity to Quaternity?

In chapter 7, verse 5, the Lord asks the people of Israel, "When you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months during those seventy years, did you really fast for Me -- for Me?" This verse is hilarious to me because of the immortal words of Ivan Drago in Rocky IV: "I fight for ME! For ME!"

Finally, a verse in chapter 8. For several years, I have tried to find ways to communicate how I think Israel plays into God's plan for the salvation of the nations. That instead of revealing Himself to the world at large, He chose Israel and gave her His laws and presence and favor so that the world would see and marvel and become jealous and want some of that awesome God thing that Israel had going for her. So it's a nice picture in Zechariah 8:23 that encapsulates that thought: "Thus says the Lord of hosts: 'In those days, ten men from every language of the nations shall grasp the sleeve of a Jewish man, saying, "Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you."'"

If you stand with Israel because you believe that God is still glorified in the way He preserves Israel, or if you believe that you are an ambassador for Christ, you should ready yourself for people tugging on your sleeves, wanting to come with you because in you they see the Lord.