Christmas Confessions

OK, it's confession time. For a long time I dreaded the entire Christmas season, with it's cheesy tunes being piped through retail store speakers, all that horrible fruitcake (does anyone actually like that stuff?) and artificially flavored eggnog, the dreadful holiday sweaters, useless gifts people will pretend to like then re-gift, tacky plastic decorations which end up in countless landfills, all those less-than-sincere "merry Christmases" wished. The only upside for this grinch was that mercifully here in the US the brainwashing starts closer to Thanksgiving, unlike Canadian retailers who launch their attack-campaign just as the Halloween jackolanterns are being tossed on the compost heap.

Looking back, I see that period of disillusionment as my growth out of my childhood Christmases into something bigger. Like all real growth, there was some discomfort from the transition out of a shell that is familiar yet too small, into something roomier. It's the in between period that left me feeling a little disillusioned and vulnerable, having left behind the Christmas of childhood and not yet having found something deeper and more satisfying.

On the first, rainy Sunday of Advent this year, I decided to subject myself to the newly released apocalyptic movie The Road. The film begins with some unspecified disaster which brings the world to an end. All plants, animals and humans are wiped out except for a few human survivors. The color palette is gray and brown, with a constant drizzle which falls out of a permanent blanket of cloud cover, which might as well be liquid depression. There is a sense of hopelessness in the first half of the film that is deeply disturbing. Houses abandoned, dead trees falling over, many survivors banding together and reduced to cannibalism.

An unnamed father and son become the center of this strange, unlikely film which turns into a plot of hope. Throughout the film, the father reminds the son that they're the "good guys", who would never stoop to cannibalism. Father reminds son that they carry the "fire", as they struggle on foot, with little nourishment southward and coastward. At no point does the environment look anything less than completely devastated, and one is left to assume that it's only a matter of time before the survivors will succumb to the inevitable. And yet father and son continue to speak of the fire, not giving up, continuing southward, not stooping to the lowest common denominator. I wanted to believe that they were right to hope, that they had good reason to continue carrying the fire, and yet it seemed almost dishonest to keep hoping when the seemingly obvious trajectory was towards complete extinction. And yet, the film ends with just a little hope that real humanity can survive even in a world where the survival instinct of humans could easily reduce them to vulture-like savageness.

Strangely, I found myself inspired and full of hope as I walked out of the theatre. At times I feel that the hope of Christmas can seem almost as delusional to someone who doesn't carry the fire. Jesus' fire was all about this Kingdom of God, which was and is right here, right now. Perhaps you could call it the Big Picture vision...and Jesus wanted us to catch it, to see reality with it. Without Big Picture vision, without the fire, we all operate at the lowest common denominator: self-interest. With Kingdom of God Big Picture vision, we see hope where there is hopelessness, good where we are told there is just evil, a third way where there is just two, and life where our hopeless eyes see death.

(Author's note: I do once again enjoy Christmas carols, Christmas trees and eggnog with real rum. I do however still avoid tacky decor and useless gifts.)

On Faith and Hell

Recently, I had a conversation with someone struggling with the challenge that the idea of a non-literal hell presented to her long held worldview. (Literal hell as in a pit with burning sulfur, conscious eternal torment…light-hearted stuff like that.) When I asked her why she needed to believe in that kind of a hell I was impressed with her unflinching honesty: “Because I need to know that people who have hurt me and my family aren’t going to be in heaven.”

I believe that most people who need to believe in a literal hell, believe it precisely because they need to know that there are real (i.e. eternal) consequences for hurting me, disagreeing with the Truth as I understand it, hurting people in my family or my country, church and so on. Many people, including myself, begin in our spiritual journeys with such a clear, neatly divided view of God’s judgment. In fact, it may even be helpful at a certain point in our journey to have such clear absolutes…think of them as training wheels that we eventually realize we don’t need once we learn how to simply have faith in God. Ah, but faith doesn’t offer us certainty by virtue of the fact that it requires trust…and it’s hard to fully trust Anyone you don’t believe to be completely good.

I’m not saying, let’s sweep human evil under the carpet. It’s impossible to go through a single day without noticing the consequences of our failure to live in God’s love. Jesus did just that: he used the present reality of Jerusalem’s town dump (gehenna) as a very effective metaphor for what happens when we choose not to walk in the way of love.

Instead, let’s take a look at ourselves. It’s been said, that when we are not changed by God, we pull God down to our level. In fact, any change of mind is preceded by a change of heart…and our hearts can be very egocentric. I wonder how much of the need to believe in a clear “in” and “out”, is simply a function of the ego’s need for security? It’s not hard to understand really…we’ve always had to identify the enemy if we were going to avoid being killed, robbed or otherwise violated. In sports we have to be able to clearly identify who’s on our team and who’s not if we’re going to win the game. We learn this lesson early on: there are winners and there are losers, and you don’t want to be a loser.

It shouldn’t be a great surprise that if our hearts are not transformed by this mysterious God who sends rain on both the just and the unjust, that it becomes too difficult to live in that tension, and we resolve that tension by making God more like us. Once we're honest about our own dark side (which we often use religion to cover), and the fact that God loves us and accepts us despite it…it makes the whole question of hell much less interesting. Perhaps we could simply say this: our need to be certain about eternal consequences is a reflection of our need for control, and our inability to fully trust in the goodness of God.

Power of Story

People don't act based on reality, they act based on the stories they believe about reality. If facts and numbers form the skeleton of our understanding of reality, stories are its flesh and blood. We become characters in the plots of the stories we believe in, often without being aware of it. In recent history, because of stories that Nazis told about Jews, and Tutsis told about Hutus, millions died. We hear stories everyday that shape our attitudes and determine our actions towards the poor, immigrants, gay people, people of other religions, and the list could go on.

I see the Bible as the Story of God, written by people imperfect as they were, who experienced a Reality that profoundly changed their understanding of the story in which they lived. The Story of God has often been over-simplified and interpreted into lists of rules meant to bring humanity into religious conformity. It sometimes gets reduced to a compilation of facts about reality which fail to inspire. The Bible is, however, mostly story. A story the reader is meant to enter into. A story we are meant to find ourselves in.

Judith M. Kunst in her book, The Burning Word, a read I highly recommend for its ability to draw the reader into God's story with playfulness, curiosity and imagination, has helped me experience God in a very real way within the pages of Scripture. With suggestions for personal practice The Burning Word invites the reader into a very engaging relationship with the God found in the pages of Scripture, a God to be wrestled with, reverenced, argued with and savored, just as the authors of the Bible themselves did. For me, it has reminded me of the fact that God continues to speak today just as God always has. The Story isn't finished, and just as the authors of the Bible wrote their parts of the Story, we are invited to write the next chapter with our communities.

Accessing God

Years ago I did what I believed every good Christian ought to do, and told my spiritually curious Jewish friend about my "personal relationship" with God. I should clarify and mention that my friend was an agnostic, cultural Jew who went to synagogue for the occasional bat mitzvah or wedding, not orthodox by any stretch of the imagination My gushing about God was met with genuine confusion. How can I claim to "talk" with a God she couldn't see, hear or touch? Fair question.

Over the years, if I'm being honest, my conversations with God have often seemed one-sided. Yes there are moments of overwhelming beauty and emotion when a song speaks to me so directly that it might as well be God Himself singing to me. Or the times when through a friend and a conversation, or a time of reflection, a light bulb goes on that might as well be illumination from the throne of God. Most of the time, however, the only voice I hear is my own. My friend did not find my circular reasoning terribly convincing. In her estimation, I was simply attributing my emotional and intellectual chatter to God. In all fairness, her skepticism has helped me more than the Christian pat-answers over the years.

While I suspect I'll always be less than fully satisfied with my relationship with God, I've learned two ridiculously simple things about accessing God:

1. Never get too comfortable with your idea of God. I have to be willing to continually let go of my preconceptions of God. Every one of us has some idea of what God is and who God is not. Many of us want to know God, to hear from Her, but only as long as what we hear jibes with what we already believe to be true about God. Fortunately, God's patience is infinitely greater than mine and God keeps drawing me in closer, expanding my heart and mind with an ever more gracious, merciful, compassionate and truly just vision of Godself. I am convinced that God speaks to everyone, all the time, Christian, or decidedly anti-Christian. So often the glimpses of limitless divine love we do get scare us, because they seem to contradict what we've been taught to believe about God. The good news is, as long as we're alive, if we're dealing with the divine God, the invitations into still larger visions of God will keep coming, no matter how many times we expand our hearts and minds. The more we begin to trust, the easier this becomes.
2. It's hard to listen when you're doing all the talking. How many of us would keep a friend if they treated us the way we treat God? We go to God when we're in crisis, when we get desperate enough we bargain with God, hoping to trick Him into giving us what we want in exchange for empty promises we have no intention of following through on. This seems like a generally bass-ackwards thing to do when dealing with the very Source of life itself. When we do talk to God, we tend to come on our terms, with our requests, our priorities and questions, on our schedules, but rarely if ever take the time to listen back. I'd lose a friend like that faster than you can say "basket-case". Despite my best intentions, I know I won't make time to listen unless I create a rhythm that allows for times of not thinking and instead, listening.

On Being Me

I won't lie, I'm 34 and it feels a little immature to be going through the angst of "finding myself" that we generally associate with the tumult of being a college student. The questions I'm asking about what it means to be me aren't the same as they were when I was 10 years younger. In my early 20's I still had a ton of handed down, pre-conceived notions of who I was supposed to be, and what I ought to expect from the world.

I spent a good part of my 20's discovering my own shadow. I discovered that the things I feared and called evil and tried to distance myself from were in fact part of my own shadow side. The more I began to come to terms with my shadow, the more I realized that I was in fact not so different from every other living being. The more I began to draw self-identity from an honest look at who I was, not who I wished I was, or from who I was afraid to be, the more I stopped comparing myself to others.

For all 2 of you who read this, I'll admit that I continue to be tempted to compare, rank and rate myself by a measurement system based on people I both admire and loathe. I doubt that temptation will ever not be there.

The struggle I'm in now, in my mid-30's, is this: just how much am I willing to sacrifice to continue to be the real me? How much self-integrity would I trade for convenience, job-security, relevance or success? (I hate the idea of relevance, isn't being human relevant enough!?) Can a person forever resist the lure of power, status, novelty, and security as the world defines it? Conventional wisdom would suggest everyone has a price. What's mine? I don't know. Hence the angst. I can only hope that the price of being anything less than the true "me" not driven by ego, or bound by fear is so high that I'll never sell out.

Mysticism

To say something sounds "mystical" or "sounds like mysticism" means that you don't need to take it seriously. It sounds like something vague, fuzzy, ungrounded, perhaps otherworldly and irrelevant. There are various definitions of the word. In the academic world for instance, the word is not so much dismissive as it is ambiguous. The word mysticism is often defined as "union with God", and there are many religious scholars who define it that way.

Many religions have a "mystical" aspect involving meditation, prayer and contemplation. The Jesus of the Gospels certainly falls into this category. He spent extended periods in the wilderness, fasted for long periods and went into states of consciousness where he faced his demons. He spent extended time in solitude and prayer, and once some of his disciples even saw him transfigure before their eyes.

Humans throughout history have often conceived of God as being "up" in heaven; out of reach, aloof, often angry and needing to be appeased. The message of Jesus was so radical it's hard to overestimate just how earth-shattering it must have been for its time. Jesus said, "I and the Father are one." The idea that a human being not only didn't have to go to a temple, ritually cleanse themselves, and appease God with sacrifices, but that a human being could incarnate God and be in unity with God was about as radical as it gets. No wonder he was always under death threat.

The earthquakes don't end there however. In the New Testament of the Christian Bible we follow a story that shows God coming "down" to dwell in humans. Apostle Paul writes that "you are all sons of God", just as Jesus was the son of God. Our bodies are described as Temples of the Holy Spirit. Mystical? Perhaps.

The significance of all of this for me is that if God lives in me, and you, and all of humanity, then how does that change how I value human life? Does it mean that every human can show me an aspect of God if I open my eyes to see and ears to hear, as Jesus so often challenged his followers? Does it mean when I dismiss, insult or worse, become indifferent to others that I dismiss, insult and become indifferent to the God who lives in them?

If God lives in me, then I can probably hear God if I'm willing to listen. If I can be one with God, that means the creative energy of God flows through me too, if I dare tap into it.

The implications of this radical idea are endless. It means radical equality of all humanity. It means God is readily accessible. It means all of us have the divine flowing through us, and we can choose to give voice to the divine, or we can allow it to be drowned out by the voices urging us to be more productive, work longer hours, be skinnier, make more money, be more popular, be sexier, to be more rational, be more shrewd, to be less of a push-over, to be more concerned with the bottom line...

I wonder if we dare believe any of this? How would it change how I viewed myself? If I didn't need to impress anymore? How would it change how I view and treat people? If there was no more "them" and "us", but just "us"? It's no wonder that they killed Jesus, Paul and many of the first Christians. What a threat to our human way of ordering and assigning worth to each other and thereby justifying our exploitation of each other. What a threat to sexism, patriarchy, slavery, ethnic and racial superiority, social elitism, undemocratic governments, violent empires, repressive regimes and religious exclusivism! It's no wonder that we humans have "toned down" this message for the last 2000 years. But, what if it's true?

Those Damn Foreigners

When I was seven, my parents moved our family from Switzerland to Canada. Even at the age of five, when my parents first planted the seed in my easily excitable mind, I dreamed of the changes and adventures of a life across an ocean I'd never even seen. Nothing could have squashed my innocent enthusiasm then. An airport just seemed like a gateway to unknown lands of adventure, and I wanted in. Little did I know then just how defining the immigrant experience would become for me.

Fortunately, my first negative experiences as a young immigrant didn't make me change averse. My first days of school didn't go too smoothly. The only words in English that I knew were "yes" and "no"...so it quickly became known that my name was "Yes". Every time I had a bad experience, I just convinced myself that there must be better schools, better friends, better countries...I just didn't know about them yet. What I really wanted, even though I would have rather died than admit this to any of my ignorant fellow third graders, was: I just wanted to be accepted.

It's only logical that the immigrant experience is the lens through which I would later also read the Bible. The Bible is full of stories about wandering foreigners in strange countries, struggling to adapt and make sense of their surroundings. I felt I could understand the tensions in the Bible, between people of different cultures and religions wanting to remain pure and undefiled by what made their neighbors different, and yet, live side by side. I liked that the story of the New Testament church was one of growing inclusiveness, because my awareness of the diversity of the world was growing too, and the stories of the Bible mirrored my own experiences.

Except....that my spiritual pedagogues told me that I had to guard against adapting to people who were not of my faith, and that it was my God-given mission to convert them to be like me. Funny how the people telling me this were the ones who never had to adapt themselves, culturally, religiously, linguistically. That never seemed right to me, even as an eleven year old, and I'm sure I pissed off many of my Sunday school teachers and pastors with my snarky objections to their well intentioned, yet misguided dogma.

Hospitality was always central to the heart of God as told through the stories of the Jewish people in the Bible. There is something about having a welcoming posture toward the stranger, with strange customs and unfamiliar ideas, that is close to the heart of God. (As an immigrant, I take comfort in that.) Jesus constantly trespassed the boundaries of socially and religiously acceptable behaviour by the kind of company he kept. In Matthew 25 those judged to be true followers of God are those that provide hospitality to the strangers, and meet the needs of the poor. (How do we miss these things?) Nowhere in the Bible do I get the impression that by providing hospitality to these strangers are we earning our place in God's Kingdom. Rather, our participation in God's hospitality takes the blinders off our culturally and religiously myopic views and helps us see the world like God sees it.

Here's where I'm at with all of this: God looks a lot like an eccentric stranger, with customs that annoy me, and views that are a shock to my sense of propriety and fairness. To welcome in that stranger, is to have my eyes opened and see God himself. To love that stranger is to love everything that God is about.

Woe. Money!

In my 34 years, I can only remember twice when we were going through what was called a recession. Maybe I was too insulated from the unforgiving inner spokes and cogs of the economic machine then, but I don't remember it being as far reaching and cruel as this current economic malaise. It seems like every time I turn around I'm hearing of someone who lost their job, or is afraid that they're about to, or experienced a significant pay cut.

It seems like an odd time to talk about generosity and money. Isn't that something you'd bring up when people aren't cutting back and just trying to make ends meet? Sure, seems logical, but isn't this just the time to think about our often contentious relationship with money? Right now, when the scarcity mentality is kicking in, right now when our residual ancestral hunter-gatherer instincts are telling us to hoard?

Every once in a while when I allow myself to step out of the fray and get a little perspective, this amazing sense of peace comes over me. We're stardust with the breath of life in us, and we've come far enough to be able to ponder the universe . . . a pretty amazing and incredible thought in itself. A universe with a God at its center that always provides for our needs if we adapt to change. So why am I worrying? Why do I give so much of my energy to just getting through life that I can't appreciate the wonder, provision, beauty and constantly evolving nature of life?

David posed a very simple question last Sunday: Is money your servant or master? I hope that I'm not letting the stuff of life get in the way of experiencing the wonder of life itself. I believe that if we share...we can all have enough. I want the stuff of life to help me experience life and I want to share it with as many other fellow travelers on this path of adventure as possible. So even more so in this crap economy, we can re-learn a lot about why this adventure so amazing, and what's worth stressing about, and what's not. And maybe if we just open our hands, we'll find out there's enough for all of us.

Living Generously

We're right in the middle of our series that re-explores seven rhythms that have become the foundation of Untitled, and last Sunday landed us on the first of a two week look at generosity. I'd love to say that generosity is always second nature for me, but like so many of us right now, the fickle winds of an uncertain future are testing what we really believe. I think most of us, myself included, would like to believe we're generous especially when we can be generous without having to give up too much.

My wife and I are learning how to live generously even while we are both adapting to to a simpler and more tightly budgeted lifestyle than we did in our single days. Add to that our different cultural baggage: she comes from a Hong Kong Chinese, honor-based culture that equates status and money with face, whereas I come from a quality-over-quantity, build-it-to-last for 400 years, un-flashy Swiss culture. Add to that the arduously slow red-tape associated with immigration which has kept Anita from working for the past two years, and things are tighter than either of us would like.

What we're both learning together is that sometimes we do have to adjust what we define as enough, but generosity isn't about how much you have to give. It's about what we believe about the nature of God. It's about what we value. It's about understanding that we're all connected, we share one planet, and humanity rises and falls together. Generosity isn't limited to money, it's our time, my willingness to listen, my creativity...it's an attitude.

We are taught to live in a scarcity mentality that says, there's only one pie out there, so you'd better get as much of it as you can, because there isn't enough to go around. We live with a low level anxiety of subconsciously trying to protect ourselves from the uncertainties of the future. Fear teaches us to hold on tightly to what we have, because you might need it tomorrow. It's a competitive win/lose mentality: your success may come at the expense of mine.

God shows us another way. Living in the scarcity mentality leads to fear and worry, which is why Jesus (Matthew 6) invites his followers to opt out of the win/lose game of accumulating as much wealth in this short life as we can. Instead we can participate in God's economy where when we seek justice and equity, not only do we not waste our lives scrambling with worry and stress, but we actually have energy to focus on the things that really matter. Win/win.

As I prepared for our talk on generosity last Sunday, I kept seeing this counter-intuitive abundance mentality in the Bible. This idea that despite our perpetual fear of not having enough (an understandable disposition at times where our ancestor's survival depended on the weather and crop gods), that there is enough for everyone. Like the sower in Matthew 13 who carelessly lets his seed fall on hard, rocky and weedy soil and not only on fertile soil like a prudent steward of limited resources, a story of generosity to a people familiar with scarcity. Like Jesus who fed a crowd of at least 4000 - 8000 people with a few loaves of bread and fishes in Matthew 15. There seems to be this assault on our sense of logic: when you're faced with an impossibly huge need, and have impossibly small resources, resist the urge to hold on to what you have, and release what little you do have in faith and see what happens. In faith that when we share what we have, that little gets multiplied. Our generosity can unlock resources that are tied up and that right now there really is enough for everyone - including me.

I don't know how it works exactly. Call it karma, call it building goodwill, call it pay-it-forward, I just know it works.

Embracing Austin

At Untitled

We are seeking to do whatever we can to help make Austin a great place for all people.

We believe that the God of The Bible is a God of new beginnings and second chances.
For us, Grace is not just a concept, it is our reality.
Knowing Christ's forgiveness compels us to show Christ's forgiveness.

We work hard to try to be different from what you might expect.
Celebrating the creator in anyone.
Creating celebration for everyone.

Diversity is something we seek to celebrate not to eliminate.
Remembering what brings us together, not what drives us apart.
Including, not excluding.

We love to do life together.
Making each other better, together.
Serving others, together.

At Untitled
We are doing whatever we can to make a place for anyone.
It doesn't matter where you've been or what you believe.
Come just as you are.
No guilt required.
No strings attached.