Jesus and His Double Edged Sword: Words

You’re hopeless, you Pharisees! Frauds! You love sitting at the head table at church dinners, love preening yourselves in the radiance of public flattery. Frauds! You’re just like unmarked graves: people walk over that nice, grassy surface, never suspecting the rot and corruption that is six feet under.’ 

One of the religion scholars spoke up: ‘Teacher, do you realize that in saying these things you’re insulting us?’ 

He said, ‘Yes, and I can be even more explicit. You’re hopeless, you religion scholars! You load people down with rules and regulations, nearly breaking their backs, but never lift even a finger to help.  ~Luke 11:43-46, The Message 

No communicator has ever held a candle in comparison to Jesus.  The words he spoke were life—while for those who refused, those same words were death.  He never wasted a word, his words were “all net” as they say in basketball .  He told short stories telling of undeniable hope and sure salvation, but coming wrath for those who refuse to believe.   He was gentle and kind, as well as sharp and poignant.  He didn’t mince words and he didn’t sugar-coat his criticisms.  He didn’t speak to those who led others astray with kid gloves. And he never failed to use his words to bring healing to the sick and rescue to the perishing. 

Jesus said, It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all.The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life (John 6:63, ESV).

Book Plans

It is with reservation I write today. I haven’t blogged here for some time and its on purpose in case you were curious. Over the course of the last several years I have been tossing around the idea of writing a book. I have stopped and I have started again numerous times. Of late, I have been stirred and shaken, its time to go for it. I had been sitting on it until I clearly saw where I wanted to go recently.

The last couple years in particular have been good in terms of writing on my blog here and elsewhere. My blogging has provided an avenue to share in so in ways that have been both helpful for me and hopefully beneficial and encouraging to those who have read. It is my intention to return to blogging, but I am currently unable as my time is needed elsewhere as I finish my book proposal and seek out an agent.

Hoping to have a good report soon.

Donald Miller: Author of “Blue Like Jazz”

Donald Miller is one of the great young writers of our time.

Incarnation

My first love
My best love
Tabernacled incarnation
Fiery torrent of jealousy
Wanting all of me eternally
Bleeding pierced heart
Dying for unquenchable love of me
Divine and unrequited lover
Waiting for me to hear your whispered love
Drawing me into the embrace of your friendship
Willing to teach me of your abundance
If only I would care to listen
Offering me no less than yourself
Your pulsing, enlivening Spirit
To indwell my being beyond measure
Why do I not care to drink deeply of you
My everything
Afraid to die of love
For you as you for me
Purge away my hardness
Amputate my fear
Boil away my coldness
Break the wall of false attachment
That pays homage to a hollow god
There is no other love like you
To cherish such as me
Ungrateful sluggard
Pretentious fool
Forgetful lover
Half a friend
And yet your love for me
Is all consuming, all-pursuing
A holocaust of self-forgetfulness
Waiting for a simple glance
Of heart to Heart
So in a moment
This perishing body
Becomes itself
A tent of meeting
A tender kiss
A nuptial promise
Of unending bliss
Losing self in love
For this was I created
You in me and I in you
Eternally

-Unknown

The Story with no rivals

The Church is called to announce the Good News of Jesus to all people and all nations. Besides the many works of mercy by which the Church must make Jesus’ love visible, it must also joyfully announce the great mystery of God’s salvation through the life, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The story of Jesus is to be proclaimed and celebrated. Some will hear and rejoice, some will remain indifferent, some will become hostile. The story of Jesus will not always be accepted, but it must be told.

We who know the story and try to live it out, have the joyful task of telling it to others. When our words rise from hearts full of love and gratitude, they will bear fruit, whether we can see this or not.  -Henri Nouwen                 

The story of Jesus never gets old or worn out.  What it does get—is twisted, mutilated, and watered down.  More of us versus less of us need to take up the profession of sharing the genuine Jesus Story. 

Ask the guy on the street about Jesus and he can tell you about doing unto others as he would have them do unto him, yes, but ask him who Jesus was and what he accomplished during his short stint here on earth, and he will be at a loss for words.  The Jesus story is under-told.   And considering what the good news signals, it is the best unkept secret in the history of mankind.  It is the epic story of redemption—redemption for you, redemption for me, and redemption for all who consider all other stories as nothing compared to His Story.

There are so many other things Jesus did. If they were all written down, each of them, one by one, I can’t imagine a world big enough to hold such a library of books.  -John’s Gospel, c21 v25

The story of Jesus is The Story with no rivals. 

so what’s your story?

The story of Christ is where we all started from, though we’ve come so far since then that there are times when you’d hardly know it to listen to us and when we hardly know it ourselves. The story of Christ is what once, somehow and somewhere, we came to Christ through. Maybe it happened little by little—a face coming slowly into focus that we’d been looking at for a long time without really seeing it, a voice gradually making itself heard among many other voices and in such a way that we couldn’t help listening after a while, couldn’t help trying somehow, in some unsatisfactory way, to answer. Or maybe there was more drama to it than that–a sudden catch of breath at the sound of his name on somebody’s lips at a moment we weren’t expecting it, a sudden welling up of tears out of a place where we didn’t think any tears were. Each of us has a tale to tell if we would only tell it. But however it happened, it comes to seem a long time ago and a long way away, and so many things have happened since—so many books read, so many sermons heard or preached, so much life lived–that to be reminded at this stage of the game of the story of Christ, where we all started, is like being suddenly called by your childhood name and maybe your childhood too.   -Frederick Buechner

        

What story is being crafted as a net result of your travels as a Jesus-follower?  What’s your place within the context of his Story?  What chapters of your story could be of value to the rest of us within the context of the Story God is telling?  Our stories apart from Jesus are rather trite after all. 

So I’ll ask again—What’s your story?  The story God is writing with your life isn’t to display up on some shelf in the corner of your den.  Your story is for sharing.

As Buechner so plainly puts it, Each of us has a tale to tell if we would only tell it.

redemption in living color

Even when you don’t try, you’re telling a story.   -Seth Godin

        

Our lives are stories, open books for all to read.  And irregardless of whether we acknowledge him or not, God is a part of those stories. God works and shows up in the grand total of our lives to be sure and the stories God is telling through our lives individually and collectively is to a large degree more creative and expansive than we have begun to imagine. The stories God is writing embody the most breath-taking and splendid of moments, right down to the minutest and seemingly least important details. Even our messes are a part of God’s narrative, for they become as beautiful messes after he gets his hands on them.

God redeems every single moment and that means every last moment counts within each story.

Stories drenched in faith are raw and complicated, unconventional and emotional, repulsive and brilliant, dramatic and mundane, painful and hopeful—stories of betrayal, trust, murder, and resurrection.  Our lives are essentially tales of redemption in living color with God as the Author.

never without a story

 ”How can we picture God’s kingdom? What kind of story can we use? It’s like a pine nut. When it lands on the ground it is quite small as seeds go, yet once it is planted it grows into a huge pine tree with thick branches. Eagles nest in it.”

With many stories like these, he [Jesus] presented his message to them, fitting the stories to their experience and maturity. He was never without a story when he spoke. When he was alone with his disciples, he went over everything, sorting out the tangles, untying the knots.   -Mark 4:30-34

     

As I practice the discipline of reflection, I am seeing that our stories our still in the making, and our remaining chapters are unwritten as the final curtain hasn’t been drawn. God is taking his time in writing a story with my life—for his good pleasure and glory—as well as my best interest.

So often I’d just assume hurry up and finish it myself, or at least get to the good parts faster. You know, ‘Skip the tedious preparation and fixings—give me the main dish already!’

The problem is that the main dish wouldn’t be the main dish without the rest. I don’t buy the line that says The Devil is in the details, my good sense says God is.  The stuff in between can be the parts and moments we sadly miss as we hit the fast-forward button. It really can be a bit to sort out as we rack our brains to make sense of it all, and that’s what it’s all about—figuring it all out, isn’t it?

Or is it?

Frederick Buechner is a king storyteller who interweaves the story of his life and the lives of those he writes about into the greater Jesus story. In his book, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, Buechner explains:

A few months ago I received a letter inviting me to speak to a group of ministers on the subject of storytelling. It was a good letter and posed a a number of questions such as: How do you use stories effectively in sermons? How do you use a story to get your point across? To what degree do you make the point of your story clear to your listeners instead of leaving them to work it out for themselves? And so on. They were all perfectly reasonable questions to which I think useful answers can be given, but the more I thought about them gave me pause. The trouble was that they were all questions that had to do with ‘how’ to tell a story instead of ‘what’ stories to tell and ‘to what end’

…And yet that the letter reminded me of is that yes, storytelling is itself immensely interesting and important. Not just for preachers and preachers-to-be, but for Christians in general. Storytelling matters enormously because it is a story, of course, that stands at the heart of our faith and that perhaps more than any other form of discourse speaks to our hearts and illumines our own stories. 

Jesus was never without a story.  Being his followers, we shouldn’t be without one either.  And since we are writers, we have all the more reason to tell some good ones.

it’s not about us

The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: Life is a story about me.  -Donald Miller

 

Our stories are as mere mirages out in the middle of a sun-scorched desert when they lack Jesus. 

As the world turns, Jesus remains the one and only constant.  Just as the story of so many loveless marriages go—they may look wonderful and happy—little do the onlookers know, it’s all a front. Conservative estimates sadly report a divorce rate in excess of sixty percent for second marriages and first ones don’t fare much better. Just like a marriage that’s all about the glitz and glamor of a fickle Eros love while it lacks true committed Agape love—our stories without Jesus are meaningless and devoid of any eternal substance.

Is it going to be our tombstone that tells the story of our lives?  Will it be our relatives who get up at our funeral service and say what a good guy we were?  Who’s not the most wonderful uncle at their own funeral? Is that going to be the legacy we leave after our few short years here? Our lives aren’t getting any longer you know. Who’s going to grateful if we had a brand new car every two years or four and a half bathrooms in our dream home, that is if we ever got our dream home.  Who is going to care how much we scrounged up a hundred years from now?  In the end it won’t matter if we were able to keep our string of annual trips to Florida alive.

What will make a difference when we are lying on our death-bed isn’t how many raises we received at work or how many books we had published. God has so much more in store for our lives than the size of our checkbooks or how many karats our wedding band supports.

Life is about something altogether different than what we have been told by the experts. The movie-stars and the famous don’t have what we think they have.  The glitzy images plastered all over the magazine covers at the check-out are more times than not nothing more than a veneer finish for the plastic lives behind the million-dollar smiles. In a rather telling interview with 60 minutes earlier this year, mega-superstar quarterback and cover boy Tom Brady had this to say… Why do I have 3 ‘Super Bowl’ rings and still think there’s something out there for me? I mean maybe a lot of people would say ‘Hey man, this is what it is… I reached my goal, my dream, my life is…’ Me, I think, ‘God—there’s got to be more than this’. The interviewer, Steve Kroft, then asks, What’s the answer?  To which Brady offers a simple, I wish I knew… I wish I knew.

Our small lives are swallowed up in the larger Story and even our dying becomes living when we follow Jesus, and things like Super Bowl rings are put into perspective. As my dad and I were having lunch not too long ago and got to talking about the life in Jesus we share—his comment was striking—You give up ‘everything’ to gain everything.  The Apostle Paul wrote, Having ‘nothing’, having ‘it all’ .

Paul knew the paradox well. He may have had little by worldly standards, or he may have had much, but either way; it all was as nothing compared to the everything he had discovered in Jesus. Like a lopsided car deal, we get to trade our $100 beater in for a shiny new Rolls-Royce.

…I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life. We didn’t fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way. I’m speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!   -2 Corinthians 6:11-13

But we are so used to our $100 beater.

Why we drag our feet and are so hesitant to trade-in our miserable lives for the only life that is meaningful and satisfies is beyond me?

One clue just might be that we fail so often to see it’s never about us.

beauty and mess

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.  -Hemingway

 

The landscape of our lives and the unfolding stories they tell much more resemble that of a beautiful Mosaic with it’s shards of broken tile than they do a neatly arranged paint by the numbers.

Some years ago, and again recently, I watched the 1992 Academy-Award winning movie, A River Runs Through It. The story-line is a tragic and typical family tale about a father and his two sons, all three avid fly-fisherman. At one point during the film the two brothers along with their father are out on the gushing riverbanks in a sort of slow motion moment held carefully within the palm of time.  Everything seems in sync; it’s serene, the fishing is good, the air is crisp, and all that encompasses the men and their unfolding drama seems in perfect harmony. As the camera catches glimpses of each man’s radiance, it couldn’t be more obvious that the satisfaction they are taking in together is off the charts. The brother narrating as the still frame is about to be eclipsed by the next clip as if the last one never happened, comments, And I knew just as surely and just as clearly that life is not a work of art and that moment could not last.

The moment didn’t last, and the story doesn’t end happily ever after.  Rather, the tale ends in tragedy—like the stories of our lives seem to often times. Our stories aren’t always cut and dry.  They are rarely black and white.  Real lives contain both good and bad and then the stuff in between.

The gospel narrative covers the gamut. 

Our redemption cost Jesus the spilling of his blood.

And all stories worth more than the paper they are written on include both the beauty and the mess.