common ground

It was my first Sunday in Moldova. My first Sunday in a different country, a different culture. Everything was new and exciting, even figuring out how to use the bathroom (though, perhaps exciting is not the right word here.) My partner and had arrived a week previous at the Home of the Good Shepherd, a children’s home near the Romanian border to spend the next two months in ministry to the kids, the family and community. After getting dressed for church in a pink and brown sleeveless dress, I asked one of the girls, Ana, if the dress was ok. She looked at me like I had snakes crawling out of my ears. You always cover your shoulders when you go to church.
According to the experience of Janice Lemke and her experience in Ukraine, many churches in the Soviet Union had limited access to Bibles. So, as their pastors attempted to lead in the truth, they often clung to the traditions they knew to be true, when there were no Bibles available.  She said that in many of the churches she served in, this became an issue as they tried to reach nonbelievers in the community, yet many of the women found they were rejected because of wearing make up or nail polish.
It’s easy see issues in other cultures, yet, is it not also true we have things we don’t realize we’re doing that hinder the Gospel?  How do we break away from this?
Randy Gariss, pastor of College Heights Christian Church, Joplin, Missouri, proposed the idea that we,  as the American church, can not exist solely by ourselves. We were not meant to. We cannot simply judge ourselves by ourselves. If we do, we become blind guides, unable to see our own short comings and unable to lead in the light of truth.

We see this very issue multiple times in the Biblical text. When David committed adultery and murder with an unrepentant heart (2 Samuel 12), it was not until Nathan confronted him with a story outside himself, that he was convicted of the truth. Where David did not recognize his own sin, he felt very strongly about a simple, fictional story. There is something revealing in seeing ourselves with a different set of eyes.

God worked in the same way in Acts. In chapter 6 we see a somewhat self-contained community. There were major issues between the Hebrew Jews and the Greek Jews, even in the Christian community. The Hebrew Jews saw themselves as “true blue Jew through and through,” and thought of the Greeks as somehow less. Specifically here, there were issues with distributing food to the Jewish and Hellenistic Christian widows.  Shortly later, this tension climaxes with the murder of Stephen, a Hellenistic Jew. While both he and Peter were preaching the same message, Peter was viewed as a “true Jew.” Stephen was not, and so he was stoned.

A while later, Barnabas goes to Antioch, where we see Christians from not only a Jewish background, but Greek as well. This community had input from multiple cultures, histories and frames of reference. It was here that Barnabas found “evidence of the grace of God.” The Jewish Christians had a view outside themselves. The Holy Spirit was working powerfully here, His hand was with them; they had a more balanced view, a more thorough and honest look at themselves.

Just as God used Nathan, He used the Gentile Christians. We cannot think that we are beyond this pattern. If we only ever see God through North American eyes, we see Jesus in only a limited, tainted view. My intention is not to say that they have it all together or are better than us; they need us just as much as we need them.  I think that is the point.: we need each other.

It is a very dangerous thing if we are influenced solely by people who are like us – who speak the same language, drink the same kind of coffee, and eat the same food. Whether or not we realize it, racism and elitism can slowly creep in, unnoticed and undetected. We must also recognize the very foundations of our faith was laid by those very different from us: the Disciples were Middle Eastern, Luther was German and Augustine was African. Without them there would be no us.

When we also deprive ourselves of a broader spectrum of faith, and “when a church loses sight of the global and even ethnic voices in the conversation, our faith and practice is limited,” (Gregg).  We need to be challenged in forgiveness by southern Sudanese brothers, who are willing to go to the north and share the message of hope with the people who hacked their families to death with machetes. We need to hear of the perseverance of sisters who endured for decades under the Iron Curtain. We need to watch in awe of the hope of children of Haiti, with nothing into the world to their name, sing and praise the God who loves them. In the grand scope of things, we know so little. Perhaps we were only meant to. Perhaps that is why we need each other.

-Kelly (kelly@commongroundva.com)

Check out “Return to Babel: Global Perspectives on the Bible” By Priscilla Pope-Levison and John R. Levison

with…
Worship Leader Jon Shores

(Starting today, every week in the extras section at www.cgrocks.org, you’ll see a set of interview questions from someone who was involved in the creative vision for that week’s service.  Please enjoy our first interview with Shoresy. -jmo)

Q: Tell us about why you chose these songs for this week.
A: At first, I thought I was just picking songs that were “easy to worship to.”  I usually try to pray before settling on a set list for Sunday morning.  After hearing Gregg’s sermon, I realized God made the set list, not me.  Each song seemed to center around the worship of Christ as the One and only Creator. This meshed perfectly with Gregg’s message of worshiping the Creator and loving the creation without worshiping it.
Q: Is there one line or theme that speaks to you?
A: The theme of “Distracted” and “Cannons” resounded with me.  We are a part creation because we were created.  We worship God with all of His creation, and loving His creation is an act of worship.
From a different angle, the line from “It is Well”: “My sin, oh the bliss, of this glorious thought. My sin not in part, but the whole. Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more.  Praise the Lord.” is just a reminder to me of how powerful Grace is.  I should have been up there dying on a cross, and I don’t have to be because of an incomprehensible sacrifice.
Q: What has God taught you personally this week from this text or topic?
A: We have a responsibility not only to our Creator, but to the rest of creation.  It’s important to care for the gift that we’ve been given, and not just because it seems like the trendy thing to do in society right now.

Any Switchfoot lovers out there?  I am too.  If you’re not, read on; this isn’t about Switchfoot.  The last few months I’ve been listening to lead singer Jon Foreman’s solo “seasons” albums – there are four companion albums that all go together: fall, winter, spring, summer.  They’re extraordinarily honest, meaning the songs have both breathtaking beauty and breathtaking pain within.

I’m driving down a country road in Stafford the other morning on the way to work – if you’ve been in my car you know there is no CD player, just a giant hole where one used to be – and I’ve got the church laptop open in the front seat playing music out of iTunes over the computer speakers.  The song that comes on is “The Cure For the Pain” – the first track off the “Fall” album.  This is one of the songs that has both the beauty and the pain; even though I’m not sure I was even really listening or even totally awake yet, as I’m driving in and out of the shadows of the trees and in the sunlight, running through the stuff that you worry about as you’re falling asleep or starting a new day, the line caught me. “Heaven knows,” he sings, “heaven knows, I’ve tried to find a cure for the pain / oh my Lord, to suffer like you do, it would be a lie to run away.”

A lie to run away?  My heart was taken back a few weeks to studying Philippians 3 in small group – I haven’t done a chapter-by-chapter study of Philippians since 8th grade probably, and let me tell you I had forgotten how those verses just hit you and hit you again and just keep coming with the hard, delightful, and very true truths.  I had decided to memorize verses 7-14 (if you see me, ask me to say them to you; we could all use a little accountability).  But as old Foreman was singing “it would be a lie to run away,” I realized: okay, if I am really about gaining Christ and being found in him, if I have really lost all things for his sake, if I really want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, if I really want to share in his sufferings, if I really want to become like him in his death, my commitment to that life is a lie if I run away from pain.

Don’t let me blaspheme here, but what it is that the Dread Pirate Roberts says to Buttercup? – “life is pain, highness; anyone who says differently is selling something.”  And okay, even though I think we have a little more hope in Christ than that (!), life in these bodies, even a new life in Christ, in this beautiful earth that God has made, we are still surrounded by sin and the destruction that happens here.  People let us down, people let our friends down, natural disasters happen, people die.  But if our call is to share in the sufferings of Jesus, who personally and physically took on the pain and death of the world, and if we want to become like him in his death, doesn’t it follow that we might experience some of that pain, that we might take some of other people’s hurt on ourselves and help them carry it?  And the truth is, even someone else’s pain hurts.

If you were in service this past week you heard Gregg talk about Ryan Bingham’s philosophy (from Up in the Air) that relationships are the heaviest burden in your backpack, and therefore, you need to take them out of the backpack and keep them from weighing you down.  Now the logic behind this is sound: if you get close to other people, care about them and care for them, you’ll get close to their problems.  And their problems will hurt and will weigh you down.  Even your care for them will weigh you down.  But isn’t this God’s design?  And Christ’s example?  Christ takes all our hurt and pain (and the hurt and pain we’ve caused other people) on himself, freeing us from it, and then tells us to love one another as much as we love ourselves (side note: if you’re anything like me, you love yourself a LOT).  We’re designed to love each other, to carry each other’s burdens, and that can hurt sometimes.  But if we want to live as citizens in God’s kingdom, to become like Jesus, it would be a lie to run away.

-Julia

I was just reading Psalm 28:9 which reads, “Save your people and bless Your inheritance; Be their shepherd also, and carry them forever.”  And I thought about what it would be like for God to carry me forever, and my first thought was, “well I wouldn’t want him to carry me forever, eventually I’d want to be able to get up and walk around by myself!” And I realized, jeez, that thing that Paul Tripp says about us wanting to get away from needing God’s grace, and wanting to be able to stand before him without needing it, that is really really true of me.

I don’t even realize it mostly, I think I let myself be okay with being “under construction” now, but that eventually, whether it’s in heaven or whenever, I want to be “completed,” and be able to stand before God and say, “okay, I’m done!” and maybe even say “I did it!” and be free of needing him!  Is independence so deeply rooted in me that I don’t want to be carried forever by the one who loves me?  That at some level I want to be an equal with him, and be able to walk beside him as a peer?  Am I such a glory thief that I want God not to make me a better worshipper of him, but to make me equal to him?  I shudder a little at that thought, but it is probably more true than I realize.  Talk about “save your people,” – save me from my raging self-love and pull me back onto the narrow path that leads to your heart, and to your glory.

Julia

As we go into a sermon series about our common ground (by Gregg!  Hooray!), common ground with each other as believers and with God as humans, these words below speak deeply to me.  I was an English major at Mary Washington (I specialized in poetry) and I find that the Spirit often reveals things about his character to me through poems, and even more often, through poems about the natural world.  Here is one of my favorite poems, from a sonnet cycle by Seamus Heaney, entitled “Glanmore Sonnets.” This is sonnet one:

I.

Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.
The mildest February for twenty years
Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound
Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.
Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.
Now the good life could be to cross a field
And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe
Of ploughs.  My lea is deeply tilled.
Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense
And I am quickened with a redolence
Of farmland as a dark unblown rose.
Wait then…Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons,
My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.
The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.

I think that in order for God to work in our lives, he often has to plow our hearts and the hard earth of our lives before anything can grow. On line eight, Heaney writes “My lea is deeply tilled,” and I think what makes that amazing is in the definition of a “lea:” it’s a field where either hay or nothing has grown for a few years, which is then plowed so that it can be used for planting.

We can often take our cues from the natural world, I think; God gives us parallels for our own lives if we examine creation. John 15 talks about how God “prunes” us; when we are “in the dust of death” (Ps 22) he breaks up our soil, and our “roots grow down into him” so that our faith grows and we overflow, unable to contain our thanks (Col 2).

I know it’s still winter (and we will be lucky if we have “the mildest February for twenty years”), but I remember this every spring: however we have let our hearts grow cold or harden, God breaks up our winter shell deliberately so that we can be not “a dark unblown rose,” but flowers in full bloom.

Julia