INTELLECTUAL. Some people connect to God through the mind. They want critical, well-informed, nuanced, but straightforward communication. They won’t settle for cheap/weak stereo-types (no matter how funny) but appreciate a “deep wisdom” based upon the complex questions that under-gird our world.

RELATIONAL. Many people are “heart” Christians. That is, they connect to God/spirituality through the lens of friendships, marriage, and family systems. These folks point out that God is a relational God, and we are called into community. When they hear a message or read something, they want to know/experience how this connects to their immediate relationships.

MYSTIC. A growing group, this sub-set values mystery, creativity, art, and paradox. They tend to gravitate towards meditation, chanting, readings, and silence.

JUSTICE. These are “hands” Christians. Their primary connecting point to God/Christian faith is building homes for Habitat, caring for the poor, spending life with the marginalized.

With any “typology” . . . there are holes and over-simplifications to be found. But, these make sense to me as I think about upcoming teachings/conferences/writing projects. Because I believe Jesus was fully human and fully God, I believe he shows us what it means to be human for our time and place. A human who showed the world what intellectual genius looks like on the ground (philosophers are still wrestling with his social ethic); what it means to live in deep friendship; what it means to endure the mystery of good and evil and the many paradoxes of being human; and what it means to pray for God’s way to be manifested on earth as it is in heaven (justice: repairing the world).

Two questions.

1. What “type” do you most identify with?

2. What “other” type does your wife/significant other/best friend belong to?

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?

Over time, the church begins to believe that the preacher has special access to God. As if God chooses some whom God will reveal deep truth to, and others . . . well . . . they can spiritually live vicariously through the preacher. It’s a bit messianic come to think of it.

The preacher talks about the hard work that marriage requires. The preacher talks about the mystery of death, birth, miracles, and God’s silence. The preacher talks about ethics, and making difficult decisions  in the daily grind of life. The preacher, on the most courageous of days, talks about forgiveness, resurrection, and hope–a few things that seem passe in today’s cut-throat gotta-get-mine-culture ethos.

Sunday after Sunday, the preacher stands up to bear witness that God is not dead. And, miracle of miracles, some leave the sacred gathering actually believing that dead people will live again.

Here’s the secret. Many preacher’s believe The Story. But all of us want to believe. Most of us, regardless of the reasons we entered into the vocation of preaching/teaching, stay in it because we know something others don’t know. It isn’t that we have special revelation or private insight pipe lined to us from Heaven via e-mail (or twitter). We stay in it because we need the stories, the church, the sleepless Saturday nights, the fear, the doubt–we need, more than most, to be so close to The Story that the only place we can really feel alive is to be in the eye of the storm, leading a local congregation in believing ten crazy things before we eat breakfast (to paraphrase Stanley Hauerwas).

Our secret is that we have no secret. We come, every Sunday, with a word. But we also come because we need a word; one that will sustain us for one more week in the life of faith.

Collision

1. REFLECTION. I used to do this last but now I do this first. In the first movement of the creative process, I listen to what God is doing in my life, how different humans around me have provided a glimpse of the divine. I am learning to trust the instincts, voices, and stories inside. This part usually requires a lot of yellow legal pad. I write quotes, stories, Scripture references . . . it just needs to get out.

2. STUDY. After I’ve purged myself of all of my memories and ideas, I get my hands on as many resources (books, DVD’s, articles, journal entries, and blogs) as possible. I literally immerse myself in what dead and living friends have written on the particular project I happen to be working on. For instance, I recently preached about preaching at the Nashville ZOE Conference. I took that prep time as an opportunity to read some of the classic sermons from Lischer’s The Company of Preachers.

3. MEDITATE. It’s critical that following self-reflection and disciplined study, I need to create space for all of this material to solidify. Usually, I go for a long walk, cut the grass, watch baseball, take a nap (though Lucas makes that almost impossible), or I put my running shoes on and take off. Some of the most important connections we make in life happen at a deep level. That is, some of the moments of revelation come when we are not thinking about anything profound in particular. We’re taught to call this the sub conscience. After we’ve reflected and studied, the mind, soul, and heart need time to get into a cadence of coherence.

4. CREATE. The hardest part for sure. The part many procrastinate until the last possible hour. This is the moment where the skin is placed on top of the skeleton, walls are placed over the frame. Up to this point, all I have are a bunch of stories, insights and sound-bytes. First, I put at the top of the page: “This teaching/sermon/essay/chapter is about ___________.” This will be my compass. Second,I always write an outline with transition sentences (the hardest thing to do in writing). After a break, I put the outline next to my computer and I type, one letter at a time the words I think I’ve been given.

Sometimes the words come with little effort. Most times, I have to fight through cell phone calls, e-mail notifications, SportsCenter cravings, the voice inside all of us that says, “But you are forgetting to ____.”

This is what I do, day after day, week after week. And I absolutely love it.

1. Technology changes everything (that’s good news and bad news). Here’s the view Lucas had from Kara’s Mac Wednesday as I gave one of the keynotes at ACU’s Summit. While I was in West Texas, he watched me live from a room in our house in Nashville.

We need to discern the way technology can bring us closer together and, at the same time, pull us apart.

2. Gnostic preaching/teaching drives me crazy. What I mean by “gnostic” is preaching and teaching that is full of ideas, principles but there are no faces, no embodied words. After I finished the M.Div. at Lipscomb (one of the most formative experiences of my young life) I tried to preach sermons that would impress my grad school profs. I’ve let go of that now. I still care very much about theology, ethics, narrative approaches to the text–however, I want to connect to everyone in the body. I have discovered that women, for some reason, do not naturally fall into the trap of gnostic communication as easily as men. Probably because we men are usually trying to prove ourselves whereas women are trying to describe the world as they see it.

3. Telling the truth is harder than you think. I was reminded of this while watching a very average movie with my brother recently. The movie, The Informant, chronicles the life and career of a man who cannot, even if his life and family depend on it, tell the truth. If memory is the pathway to truth than we’d all do better if we paid attention to the ways in which we have learned to remember. Many times we have to fight the urge to remember things how we wanted them to turn out, in ways that make us look better, in ways that make others look inferior. I think it was Mark Twain who said, “If you always tell the truth you won’t have to remember what you’ve said.” This is one of the gifts of being married to Kara–she constantly challenges me to make sure I describe my life/actions/speech with accuracy and authenticity. I have known some people who’ve been lying for so long (taking what is true and not offering the opposite but taking what is true and twisting it ever so slightly) it’s nearly impossible for them to reclaim the ability to be a truth-teller.

—
Advent reminds us that when God came among us in Jesus, he did not come as a ghost, hologram, vision, or media stunt. He came to us through a teenage girl not properly married. God came to us, not in the pomp and circumstance of royalty, but in the humility of a working class commoner. Jesus was born to a father who worked tirelessly with his hands and a mother who, most would say, wasn’t fit for the task of raising a child, let alone the child upon whom millions would rest their hopes for salvation.

Yet, in contemporary religious America, Mary is a polarizing figure. For Catholics, she is the essence of what it means to be a disciple. Against all odds, and against her reputation (we have names for children born out of wedlock as well as women who have children out of wedlock) she opens her hands to a God who refuses to force himself on people, and says, “Yes. I am the Lord’s servant, may it be to me as you have said.”

In other circles of Christianity, however, Protestants snicker and scoff at such notions. “They worship Mary. Those people are strange. Why do they spend so much time talking about Mary and not about Jesus?” Part of that observation is fair, but part misses out on what’s really happening in the Jesus Story.

Church tradition teaches us that Mary is the “god-bearer” . . . the theotokos. Mary is literally the one who agrees to bring God into his own world, though it will cost her everything: her fiancé’s trust, her parent’s adoration, and public standing. The story comes to a grand crescendo and for a brief moment pauses, waiting to see what Mary’s answer will be. “You can decide to be a daredevil, a test pilot, a gambler. You can set your book down and listen to a strange creature’s strange idea. You can decide to take part in a plan you did not choose, doing things you do not know how to do for reasons you do not entirely understand. You can take part in a thrilling and dangerous scheme with no script and no guarantees. You can agree to smuggle God into the world inside your own body” (Barbara Brown Taylor in Gospel Medicine, 153). This is the meaning of theotokos. Mary is courageous enough to smuggle (tokos) God (theo) into our world.

Even in our modern, technology-driven world, risk-takers are needed. Moms who take great risks for their children. Moms who risk societal shame for the sake of their children’s spirituality. Moms willing to go to great lengths to make sure their children know that it is God— not Caesar, the U.N., the President—who rules our world and invites us into relationship with him.

When mothers commit to this story, the outcomes are unpredictable. Mary could not have known how her son would alter the course of human history. She could not have possibly been able to gage the effect that her spirituality would have on Jesus— the single greatest influencer of spirituality, politics, and man’s search for meaning and for God himself.

I’ve often wondered about the relationship of Jesus’ development to his own parents. We know that Joseph moves to the backstage in Luke and Matthew’s account. Some church historians believe that Joseph died not long after Jesus became an adult. Mary, however, is in the story from beginning to end. One of her other sons, James, would become a pillar of the Jerusalem church, writing a letter we now have in our New Testament.

If you look twice at Mary’s story, you don’t see a statue planted on someone’s front yard or tucked away in a church sanctuary. Here’s what you see: A young mother, a mere teenager, hovering over her first born. Her other children would come quite normally (thank God!) but her firstborn is different. Angels, visions, visitors all point out that this boy is God’s agent of liberation. If you look close enough you can hear Mary singing over her sleeping child. Joseph is in bed, and she slips into Jesus’ room to remind him who he is, where he comes from. She begins to sing the same song God placed in her heart a few years prior. “My soul magnifies the Lord . . . His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty,” (Lk. 1).

When we say “yes” to God, he always answers with a resounding and eternal “Yes!” God’s yes to Mary is good news. God takes the messy, mixed, complicated, deep, and true spirituality of Mary and blesses the entire world.