You Say It

If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “Move from here to there,” and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you. (Matthew 17.20)

All of this Lenten off-loading and sorting-out has me surrounded by tall piles of junk. Here’s my short temper, and over there is my pride, and next to that, my knee-jerk negativity toward people who—in my unqualified estimation—have no clue about what’s going on in the world. Night before last I was at they gym, going through my treadmill paces, as one of those “Real Housewives” shows played on the overhead TV. I was listening to gospel music on my iPod and couldn’t hear a word they said. But just from the look of them, I decided I didn’t like these people. I automatically assumed they were silly and gauche and I thought, “If our paths crossed, I’d get away from them as fast as I could.” Just that quick, a voice in the recesses of my brain challenged me. “Really?” it asked. “You’ll go out of your way to talk to a homeless person, but you’re okay with sneering at nouveau riche folks? How can that be right?”

Lent will do that. It has a way of pulling us up short and highlighting idle assumptions that evidence how much further we have to go to be like the Lord. Jesus spent a lot of time with poor people. But He showed kindness and hospitality to wealthy and grandiose types, too. If the Samaritan woman at the well had been a Real Housewife (and she may have been), He wouldn’t have turned her away. Where do I get off imagining I can do differently? So there you go. Add unjust attitudes about the privileged few to my heaps.

After a while, it starts to feel like our shortcomings are closing in on us. Wherever we turn, there’s another mountain. Our Lenten progress reaches a standstill, because we can no longer scale the foolishness we pile up. Our first instinct is to appeal to God’s mercy (the right thing) and expect God to move our mountains for us (the wrong thing). We want God to serve our interests as a single-handed demolition crew, blow our weaknesses sky-high, and clear the way so we can get on with our lives. That’s not going to happen.

No sooner had I been chastened for my condescension than my iPod shuffled up a tune that spoke to my problem. It was a song I’d never really paid attention to, “That’s How the Lord Works,” by The Thomas Whitfield Singers. The soloist sang, “I asked God to move my mountains, but instead God increased my faith.” The choir answered, “That’s how the Lord works; that’s just like God.” I had to think about that for a minute.

The allusion, of course, is Jesus’s promise in Matthew 17.20 (repeated almost verbatim in Matthew 21.21): “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.” We get all excited about the dramatic proportions of His imagery—a teeny tiny seed of faith can move impossibly huge mountains. But if we look at enormous piles of our junk, and then ask God to move them for us, are we truly following the principle Jesus lays out? “You”—not “God”—“will say to this mountain, ‘Move,’” He says.

Moving our mountains is our responsibility. God makes it possible the instant we confess belief they can be moved. The size of our faith doesn’t have to equal the scope of our problems. It just needs to plant confidence that moving mountains is not impossible. Speaking to them acknowledges that we see them for what they are. We can no longer cloak them in language of denial and justification. They are mountains. They need to move. “You say it,” Jesus promises, “and nothing will be impossible for you.”

Staring Back

My soul clings to the dust; revive me according to Your word. When I told of my ways, You answered me; teach me Your statutes. (Psalm 119.25-26)

The evangelical author Ravi Zacharias writes:

The Bible is not only written to be read; rather, it reads us. How incredible that God has a personal interest in the struggles of our lives and has chosen to reveal Himself through the course of history in the pages of the Bible.

The concept of the Bible reading us—staring back into our hearts even as we look into its pages—is nothing short of revelatory to me. We talk of Scripture as a dialogue of sorts. Delving into its content is the only reliable means we have of hearing what God wants to tell us. That’s why our search for guidance constantly leads to the Bible. Our confidence that it conveys God’s Word brings its messages to life, and once we’ve pinpointed a passage or theme that speaks to our immediate condition, we apply its principles to our circumstances.

Yet our bond with Scripture is often tenuous at best. For many of us, there’s a formality with which we approach the Bible that often stymies our direct connection with what it says. It’s difficult to imagine how an ancient text can address the complexities of modern life. And the best way to bridge that gap is to open the Bible with full expectation that it sees us as much as we see it. While we look for answers it contains, it finds us with questions about where we are and what we need. This is more than a dialogue. It's a trusted friendship based on acceptance and candor—the meeting of two close and beloved friends: God and us. It’s a love story.

Nowhere in Scripture is this romance more vividly portrayed than Psalm 119. David is overwhelmed. His enemies have surrounded him. His own people don’t understand him. He’s coming to grips with realizing that being a hero and king isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. He opens the Scripture, where he not only finds the assurance that God is faithful, but he discovers God’s Word staring back at him, seeing him as he truly is, understanding his misgivings and weaknesses, and yet loving him with all the concern and stubbornness of a true friend. “My soul clings to the dust; revive me according to Your word. When I told of my ways, You answered me; teach me Your statutes,” he prays.

During Lent’s season of consecration, when we devote increased time to prayerful reading of God’s Word, we remember that opening its pages involves more than seeing and understanding what it says. It is an act of faith that rejoices in being seen and understood. Often, our interaction with Scripture is less about finding out what we should know and more about discovering we are known to this God Who has pledged to love and care for us always. In our daily devotions, we should become sensitive to the liveliness of the exchange that transpires between Scripture and us. While we are reading it, it’s reading us.

Onward

Let anyone who is thirsty come to Me, and let the one who believes in Me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” (John 7.37-38)

One of my favorite Taizé chants repeats this simple verse:

By night we travel in darkness, in search of the living water

Only our thirst leads us onward

Only our thirst leads us onward

The original Spanish of the chant’s last phrase, sólo la sed nos alumbra, actually translates as, “only the thirst lights us,” indicating that a deep inner desire to taste Christ’s living water somehow illumines us even though we often can’t see our way. In our driest, darkest hours, Jesus’s promise to quench our thirst becomes the lamp that draws us to Him.

If we’re feeling parched, possibly even a little listless and disoriented, at this stage in our Lenten journey, we’re actually in good shape. It means that all the other refreshments we rely on—good intentions, determination, and religious pride, for instance—are starting to evaporate. We’ve reached the point where our thirst can only be satisfied by raw faith in Christ. And the grand irony of this venture is manifest when we discover that we carry rivers of living water within us. “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water,” Jesus says. But we can’t release the rivers of life and satisfy our thirst until we reach Christ. “Let anyone who is thirsty come to Me, and let the one who believes in Me drink.”

Only our thirst leads us onward

Only the thirst lights us

Lent’s desert imagery encourages us to frame it as a daytime activity. (Advent is the nocturnal quest.) Yet if we’re looking at vast, unmapped, barren expanses, traveling by day is much the same as traveling by night. We are at place where all we have to go on resides in us. Now is the time when we let go of intellect so that instinct can take over. Our heart, full and overflowing with life-giving water that quenches our deepest thirsts, guides us. It will lead us to the place where our longing for Christ will be met.

In Philippians 3.13-16, we hear Paul’s famous “onward and upward” admonition: “This one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us then who are mature be of the same mind; and if you think differently about anything, this too God will reveal to you. Only let us hold fast to what we have attained.”

The water we crave is already there, waiting for us to reach the place where we’re truly walking by faith and not by sight. Once we cross that tipping point, we will be satisfied, refreshed, and renewed. Right now, we have to remember that our thirst leads us onward.

Only the thirst lights us

Always Content, Never Complacent

I have learned to be content with whatever I have. (Philippians 4.11)

“I don’t like Paul.” I’ve heard several people say this lately. My response is always the same—a sympathetic nod—because Paul isn’t easy to like. On one page, he takes our breath away with eloquent dissertations on God’s grace. On the next, he trips all over himself, snarling at his detractors, belittling women, and mistaking swagger for certainty. But while I too quarrel with Paul’s personality and more than a few of his ideas, I like him very much. I like him because he’s difficult to like. I like him because he’s never reluctant to admit to his messiness. Most of all, I like him because he’s our finest example of a sincere Christian trying to figure out how all of this is supposed to work and what it all means.

I see Paul as a sort of lead investigator in the faith lab. He’s constantly at work, observing new phenomena, combining ancestral beliefs with novel approaches, debunking outdated myths, replacing them with fresh paradigms, and always—always—struggling unlock the Gospel’s revolutionary truths. Paul insists on publishing his findings as he goes, a daring proposition for anyone carving out new territory, let alone someone tasked with establishing the principles and practices of a radical faith movement. As a result, we’re privy to his blunders as well as his breakthroughs. It’s why we see him barrel down a dead-end alley one place—for instance, in his condescension toward women’s roles in the home and church—and then reverse his direction elsewhere, as he does by declaring, “there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus,” in Galatians 3. These flaws attest to Paul’s obsession with figuring things out. Despite his irksome vanity, he’s not interested in proving how smart he is. He’s doing his best to put everything together for the sake of the Gospel. He may not be likeable. But he’s always sincere.

We can get closer to Paul by recalling that, like many of us, he’s the product of a highly prescriptive faith environment. Before Christ charges him to be an Apostle, he already knows the Hebrew Bible by heart and has gained respect as a model seminarian. On top of that, he’s a Roman citizen, a foreign-born Jew of the merchant class, a person of privilege. So he comes from an entirely different place than the other disciples. By the time he’s stopped by a vision of Jesus on the Damascus Road, he’s sure he’s got a handle on how things work. Now he has to start all over again. And one of the key shifts in Paul’s life occurs when he learns to differentiate between complacency and contentment.

In Philippians 4.11-13, we find Paul’s magnificent contentment confession: “I have learned to be content with whatever I have… In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need.” And what is his secret? “I can do all things through Christ Who strengthens me.” We can assume Paul’s talking only about his physical and material needs. Yet I’m of the mind it runs deeper than that. I believe he would also add, “I know what it’s like to be religiously complacent and how to be content with unanswered questions. I can remain committed to trying to figure it all out, while conceding it’s more than I can ever comprehend.” Now his famous “I can do all things” statement becomes an epic declaration of faith in the making.

I’m thoroughly convinced that every Lenten desert contains a Damascus Road of some kind—a bracing encounter with Christ that calls us away from shallow lives of religious complacency and leads to the deeper mysteries of faith. We won’t figure it all out. We’ll make blunders and find ourselves backtracking from ideas we’ve embraced in the past. Not everyone will be happy with us. But in our pursuit of right relationship with God we can find contentment. Paul told Timothy, “There is great gain in godliness combined with contentment.” (1 Timothy 6.6) Pursuing God’s will and way inevitably requires us to start over, clearing away ready-made answers to make room for questions we can’t possibly resolve. But when we combine that with contentment, we will gain strength for our journey and discover lives of faith that are anything but complacent.

Fashion Sense

As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. (Colossians 3.12)

A Clean House

There is a great Southern tradition that encourages entering the New Year with a clean house—not merely a neat one, but a clean one. In the days leading up to the holiday, many Southerners take stock of all they’ve accumulated over the past year and decide what’s worth saving and what isn’t. They dig through cupboards, discarding stale items shoved into the corners. Old magazines and loose papers of no lasting value get tossed out. They inventory their closets for clothing they’ve ignored—or had no use for—during the past 12 months. Getting rid of outdated stuff makes room for new blessings. It’s an exercise in creating clarity, the means to free oneself of unnecessary encumbrances.

Now, to be perfectly honest, I’ve never known anyone who followed this custom all the way through. It’s a massive undertaking that demands enormous energy—usually in short supply coming on Christmas’s heels. But the tradition remains compelling because its intent focuses one’s thoughts about the New Year. It raises important questions about what we carry with us, along with what we don’t need, as we move forward in time. While we may not have the wherewithal to purge our homes of a year’s worth of obsolete rubbish, we can surely find time to survey our lives. Are there stale ideas cluttering our cupboards? Are we hanging onto things with no lasting value? Are our closets crammed with unbecoming attitudes and habits we should be relieved of? Entering the New Year with a clean house is a wonderful thing.

The Ugly Stuff

A big part of our trouble with letting go useless—and often detrimental—things we’ve taken on springs from not knowing what will replace them. If I discard unproductive resentments, anxieties, prejudices, and memories I’ve clung to, what’s left? Something in us fears looking at a severely thinned-out closet. Yet Sunday’s New Testament reading (Colossians 3.12-17) presents an enviable wardrobe of new fashions for the taking. In verses 12-14 we read, “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” The long list of desirable clothing the writer names—compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness, and love—is extremely helpful in two ways. First, it tells us what should be in our closets; it calls out attitudes and behaviors that define the faithful believer’s style. But it also identifies what shouldn’t be left hanging around. Anything that contradicts or compromises the qualities it describes must go. There’s no room in our closets for injustice, cruelty, pride, aggression, impatience, resentment, and hatred.

Of course, such negative traits are ugly things—too ugly for most of us to imagine ever wearing in public. But they have a way of creeping into our wardrobes because they’re all too common in fashions we see every day. They’re like trendy clothes we’ve worn in the past, donned under pressure to appear “stylish,” only to look back once the trend has faded and see how hideous and unflattering they really were. What’s more, if we’re not thorough in our resolve to toss out the ugly stuff, it tends to turn up in trivial accessories that detract from an otherwise attractive style. All it takes is a funky belt or scarf or set of earrings to throw the whole look off. What seems subtle and inconsequential at first becomes glaringly gauche. Anything that clashes with Colossians’ classic Christian look puts us at risk of ruining God’s reflection. The tiniest lapel pin can be a dead giveaway that our witness isn’t what it should be.

Wear What We Are

The style that Colossians urges us to adopt is hardly haute couture. It’s not an elitist fashion that costs more than we can afford and makes statements about our social and economic standing. Indeed, the Colossians collection is ready-to-wear, or as French designers call it, prêt-à-porter—literally, for the taking. (US merchants call it “off the rack.”) As God’s children, these qualities are readily available to us. They’re styles that we can easily understand and emulate, having experienced their grace and beauty through Christ’s power. Being recipients of God’s compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness, and love, we know what they look like. We know how well they work together, bound, as the writer says, in perfect harmony. We know the joy they bring, how appealing they are, and how well they fit us.

The call that arises from Colossians challenges our intentions. Will we embrace a classically Christian fashion sense that mirrors all that Christ offers us? Or will we settle for quickly outmoded trends and funky touches that diminish us? Will we persist in being slaves to worldly fashions or will we clothe ourselves in keeping with our identity as holy and beloved children of God? Personally, I’ve never put much credence in the adage “you are what you wear.” But the Colossians writer invites us to view the notion in reverse, encouraging us to wear what we are.

I pray we all take time to inventory our closets during these closing hours of 2012. May we enter 2013 with clean houses and wardrobes filled to overflowing with attitudes and behaviors becoming to God and us.

Happy New Year!

Colossians urges us to adopt a classic Christian look that is becoming to God and us—and the New Year presents a prime opportunity to inventory our wardrobes.