I recently started preaching/teaching through the Gospel of Luke @ Otter Creek. This past Sunday I worked through the first four verses of Luke’s Jesus Story. Here’s a paraphrase of Luke’s introduction (really, it’s his disclosure for motivation).

Various men and women have used their creative abilities to capture the events just as those events had been transferred by people who were present at the time of Jesus’ remarkable life, telling that story to everyone who would listen. Because I’ve done my own homework, surgically combing my way through stories, testimony, examples, and evidence–I was compelled to join in the creative process of retelling the Jesus Story for my good friend (your love for God is refreshing). I’m telling stories of Jesus as a part of The Story so that you will continue to be drawn into a deeper trust of the events you’ve been immersed in.

Luke realizes that he stands, two generations after the death of Jesus, in a long line of witnesses who believe that, in Jesus, God had forever rocked the world. The world would never be the same. Death, sin, poverty, power, oppression–they would all be turned upside down.

Barbara Brown Taylor once wrote that Jesus forever changed the history of human civilization and yet, remained in a square area of that of the state of New Jersey. Why? How could that happen? “All because people talk,” writes Taylor.

Some people believe that stories are fragile, untrustworthy, weak. But to be Christian is to be enrolled in a story.

My friend John York has influenced me profoundly in this manner. In a sermon he preached a few years ago, he said: Some of you have heard me tell the story before that I originally heard from Fred Craddock. It’s the story of Scott Momaday, a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and poet, also a Professor of Literature with a Ph.D. from Stanford, and a Kiowa Indian. When Momaday was a small boy, his father waked him early one morning and said, “I want you to get up, go with me.” His father took him by the hand and led him to the house of an old Indian squaw and left him; said “I’ll get you this afternoon.” All day long the old squaw of the Kiowa tribe told stories to the boy, sang songs to the boy, described rituals to the boy, told the history of the Kiowa to the boy. How they began out of a hollow log in the Yellowstone River, of the migration southward, telling the story of wars with other tribes, the great blizzards, the buffalo hunt, the coming of the White Man, the pressure and the war and the moving south, Kansas, privation, starvation, diminished tribe, finally Fort Sill, reservation, confinement. About dark, his father came and said, “Son, its time to go.” Momaday later looked back on that experience and said, “I left her house a Kiowa.” Craddock tells that story and then asks the question, “When children leave our church buildings do they leave Christian? Because to be Christian is to be enrolled in the story and anyone who can’t remember any farther back than his or her own birth is an orphan.” Anyone who can’t remember any farther back than his or her own birth is an orphan. When our children leave our church buildings do they leave Christian? Is this where they learn who they are?

These quotes grabbed my heart Wednesday night during our Vespers gathering (Thanks to Phil Wilson for sending these to me).

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality–not as we expect it to be but as it is–is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

(Frederick Buechner)

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.

(Frederick Buechner)

Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.

(Frederick Buechner)

In the entire history of the universe, let alone in your own history, there has never been another day just like today, and there will never be another just like it again. Today is the point to which all your yesterdays have been leading since the hour of your birth. It is the point from which all your tomorrows will proceed until the hour of your death. If you were aware of how precious today is, you could hardly live through it. Unless you are aware of how precious it is, you can hardly be said to be living at all.

(Frederick Buechner)

Over the next several weeks, I’ll post excerpts from the book I just wrote, The Feast.  In the meantime, here’s what Brian McLaren wrote about the book. You can purchase the book here.

Harvey Cox, in his new groundbreaking book The Future of Faith (Harper, 2009), talks about Christian history in three eras. First came the era of faith, a relatively short period of profound and powerful confidence in Jesus and his message. Soon, the era of faith gave way to the age of belief, where correct beliefs about Jesus took precedence over dynamic confidence in Jesus. We’re now coming to the end of that age of belief, Cox says: the age of the Spirit is dawning, and in many ways this new chapter in Christian history has more in common with the first era than the second.

According to Cox, in the era of faith, to be a Christian was to follow a way of life as one in this world but not of it. In the era of belief, to be a Christian was to adhere to a system of belief, codified in creed and confession, argued in proposition and polemic, enforced by inquisition and heresy trial. In the age of the Spirit, he says, we rediscover our faith as a way of life again. As central as the concept of orthodoxy was to the age of belief, spirituality is to the age of the Spirit. And that’s what makes Josh Graves’ new book so important and worthwhile.

As I read The Feast, I felt I was being given a window into the soul of Cox’s era of the Spirit. As the subtitle makes clear, Josh Graves knows that the soul’s hunger is not satisfied by right beliefs alone. People crave spirituality, and not just a wishy-washy, airy-fairy, this-and-that spirituality, either. They want a robust, lifelong, dynamic, profound, and deep-rooted (or radical) spirituality that is focused, not simply on “my needs” or “my feelings,” but on Jesus and his mission in our world. They seek what Graves calls “the Real Jesus,” and they want to be led by the Spirit of the real Jesus to engage with this world‘s messiest realities: injustice, racism, economic inequity, hate, fear.

That’s why I believe that young adults will be especially drawn to this book: it deals with the messy world in which they are coming of age. And of course, older folks who have grown tired and disillusioned with religion-as-usual will also find a feast in these pages. Drawing from top scholars like Walter Brueggemann and N. T. Wright one moment, from pop culture like the “Truman Show” the next, and from his own life experience in between, Josh Graves speaks as a native in the Age of the Spirit.

Brian McLaren, author/speaker/activist
Laurel, Maryland

This article captures the culture/ethos of Otter Creek. When people ask me how I could move from Michigan (where I had a great job, near family) . . . I tell them, Otter Creek Church is that special.

This article is one glimpse into this community of faith.

“Several years ago I was busy with Luke the physician, imagining what it must have been like for him to leave his medical practice for the preaching life. The way I figure it, he did not stop carrying his black bag. He simply repacked it, taking out the scissors, scalpel, and tincture of iodine to make room for the medicine of the gospel–those healing stories of God that did more to put people back together than all the potions in the world. There were beatitudes for the stricken and prophecies for the blind. There were instructions for the paralyzed and parables for the hard of hearing. There were acted-out words of God for those who no longer trusted words and there was silence when all else had failed . . . And not just then but now. And not just me but you. We are all doctors of the gospel. We are all tellers of the story, which does not heal by taking away the pain but by giving us a way to live with it–naming it, sharing it, enduring it. To run from what hurts is natural. To fact it is not, and yet that is where our true health lies. If we are able to turn towards the pain of the world and let it do its work, the result may be hearts broke open to God and one another. Those who live their lives shall find them.” BBT in Gospel Medicine, ix-xii

I’ve been teaching on spiritual disciplines as evangelism at Otter Creek the last four weeks. Tomorrow, I’m going to teach (with a friend) on the power of confession.

The tendency in many confessions (public/private; religious/secular) is for the one confessing to tell the amount of truth necessary to convince the audience of a contrite heart without telling too much as to increase one’s chances of being completely marginalized for the sin/violation/transgression under examination. I like how Mark Twain wrote that if “you always tell the truth, you don’t have to remember what you said.”

Tiger’s first confession was an example of the former. His second was an example of a profound awareness that perception and reality were as distant as Republicans and Democrats on health care reform. It appears now that his second confession has cleared the landscape for authentic healing.

Confession’s ultimate power is it’s ability to create a community without barriers. When we talk about how great we are, we become competitors. When we talk about the darkness within, we become family (to paraphrase Karl Barth).

U2 calls this, on their newest album, a “Moment of Surrender.” That speaks to me. That makes me want to find someone I trust and get on with the business of confession.

My favorite time of the day is actually not during the day. It happens at night. Usually around 10pm, Kara and I go downstairs to read, get ready for the next day of work. Lucas has been asleep for a few hours by this point. We can’t help ourselves.

We tip-toe into his room and peer over the crib partly to check on him, partly to look at his beautiful face, partly to behold. Every time we do this, a profound feeling of possibility runs through my bones. His room becomes holy ground.

As I’ve been glued to the death and destruction consuming Haiti, I know that God loves the people of Haiti more than I love Lucas. My hands almost refuse to let me type the previous. My heart wins out. I know it’s true. If it isn’t, I don’t believe in truth.

Lucas’ future is wide open. Who knows what stories God will write with him.

On this MLK day while pundits debate his influence, strategy, and overall identity (remembering that many don’t want to recognize the MLK’s of today), I recall a story from early in Martin Luther King’s life.

Martin was actually born “Michael” King. Different versions of the story still circulate. From what we can tell, “Daddy King” (a remarkable, self-made preacher himself) felt Michael had unbridled potential. The kind of potential that did not come around often.

So, he changed his name to Martin in honor of the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther. MLK would be as significant, if not more, in his time, as Martin Luther was in his own context. “Daddy King” had a feeling about his son.

Little boys and little girls can change the world. As long as I believe that, I’ll sneak into  Lucas’ room and pray that God would plant dreams in his heart; dreams that will take root, slowly over time, blooming into something that blesses the world.

When Lucas entered our world eight months ago, I could barely make sense of it. Too many emotions, new fears, and responsibilities came all at once. Now I’m slowly beginning to realize the significance of a child–it’s like God is writing a new character into our story. I’ll never be the same. Neither will Kara.

Possibility wakes us each morning. It’s important to name the possibility for what is and go after it with every ounce of energy we can muster.