Stop Pretending

Greetings All,

 

    This week's 'thought' comes to you from Mike Yaconelli's book, "Messy Spirituality."  The book claims to be, "a stong antidote for the spiritual perfectionism in us all..." giving us, "truths that can cut us loose from the tyranny of the ought-to's and open our eyes to the deep spirituality of being loved by the God who meets us and transforms us in the midst of a messy and unpredictable life."  It's a book that does live up to its claim.  

     As I have told others, I love the way he writes and the true stories he tells.  There is an honest, humble and gracious undercurrent that runs throughout the book, as well as a repeated emphasis on the need to be liberated from the pressure to "pretend" in our spiritual lives.  

    The following thought, in fact, comes from the section entitled,  "Unpretending."   And since I know that churches in particular can often be guilty of pressuring people to "pretend" -- and have even driven people from the church for being too honest -- I pray his words might heal and minister grace to you if that has been your personal experience. You may even want to pick up a copy of the book for yourself and then pass it on to others.  His perspective really is refreshing. Enjoy. 

"They were good in the worst sense of the word."

Mark Twain

       "There is no room for pretending in the spiritual life.  Unfortunately, in many religious circles, there exists an unwritten rule. Pretend. Act like God is in control when you don't really believe he is.  Give the impression everything is okay in your life when it's not.  Pretend you believe when you doubt; hide your imperfections; maintain the image of a perfect marriage with healthy and well-adjusted children when your family is like any other normal dysfunctional family.  And whatever you do, don't admit that you sin. 

        Practically, pretending is efficient, uncomplicated, and quick.  Answering 'Fine' to the question 'How are you doing?' is much easier and quicker than saying, 'Not very well, thank you; my back is bothering me, my teenage children are disappointing me, I'm unhappy with my body, my husband never speaks to me, and I'm wondering if Christianity is true.'   Honesty requires a huge investment of time and energy from the person asking the question (who would then wish they'd never asked). 

        Pretending is the grease of modern nonrelationships. Pretending perpetuates the illusion of relationships by connecting us on the basis of who we aren't.  People who pretend have pretend relationships.  But being real is a synonym for messy spirituality, because when we are real, our messiness is there for everyone to see. 

        Some people consider the use of words like messy spirituality rude and audacious.  "How dare you suggest that people are messy? What are you proposing?  Are you suggesting that sin is okay, that we should condone less than a 100 percent effort to serve God?  You are too negative.  It's not helpful to emphasize our flaws." But the truth is we are a mess.  None of us is who we appear to be.  We all have secrets.  We all have issues.  We all struggle from time to time.  No one is perfect.  Not one.  (I have just paraphrased Romans 3:10).   

        The essence of messy spirituality is the refusal to pretend, to lie, or to allow others to believe we are something we are not.  Unfortunately, people can handle the most difficult issues more easily than they can handle the lack of pretending. When you and I stop pretending, we expose the pretending of everyone else.  The bubble of the perfect Christian life is burst, and we all must face the reality of our brokenness.... 

        For a period of time, we were lucky enough to have a housekeeper.  She would come in once a week to dust, vacuum, and clean every little out-of-the-way corner of our house. I dreaded the day she came, because my wife and I would spend all morning cleaning the house for the housekeeper!  We didn't want the house to be dirty, or what would the housekeeper think?! 

        We act the same way with God.  We talk our way out of the spiritual life by refusing to come to God as we are.  Instead, we decide to wait until we are ready to come as we aren't.  We decide that the way we lived yesterday, last week, or last year makes us 'damaged goods' and that until we start living 'right,' we're not 'God material.'  Some of us actually believe that until we clean up the mess, Jesus won't have anything to do with us.  The opposite is true.  Until we admit we are a mess Jesus won't have anything to do with us. Once we admit how unlovely we are, how lost we are, Jesus shows up unexpectedly.  

         According to the New Testament, Jesus is attracted to the unattractive.  He prefers the lost ones over the found ones, the losers over the winners, the broken instead of the whole, the messy instead of the unmessy, the crippled instead of the non-crippled.... I want my crippled soul to escape the cold and sterile spirituality of a religion where only the perfect nondisabled get in.  I want to lurch forward to Jesus, where the unwelcome receive a welcome and the unqualified get qualified.  I want to hear Jesus tell me I can dance when everyone else says I can't.  I want to hear Jesus walk over and whisper to this handicapped, messy Christian, "Do you want to dance?""

   

        Being open, transparent, and honest (that is, refusing to pretend) is frightening.  And the reason it's so frigthening is because we are always unsure of how people will react when are (even close friends).  It's scary to expose your soul in a place where others will not.  Yaconelli is right, the person who "stops pretending exposes the pretending of others," and that can make those "others" every uncomfortable.  Uncomfortable to the point where they avoid that person who is not willing to pretend.  

      That's my subtle way of saying we need to stop pretending, but we also need to choose wisely whom we bear our souls to, since not everyone in any given church can handle it or respond to it with grace. 

        Sinners (even of the more "notorious" brand) felt comfortable and safe bearing their soul around Jesus (John 4). Yet, as far as we can see, being able to do so actually led to their conversion.   

  
      May we who are His followers -- called to imitate Him and His ways -- also make others feel the same around us.

         

        To the greater praise of His grace,  Pastor Jeff

Forgiven

Greetings All,

This weeks 'thought' comes from the late Michael Yaconelli, in his book, "Messy Spirituality" -- a short read, but well worth your time. It has to do with the grace of Jesus when he encounters people who are moral disasters and can't seem to escape their past or the consequences of the poor choices they've made. Though present day examples of such individuals abound, he finds a biblical example of such a person in the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:1-38).

She's a person who is apparently subject to relationship idolatry. A person living under the fanciful misconception that someday she'll find that "perfect man" who will make her happy -- not knowing that what she was really yearning for and searching for so relentlessly, was God.

I believe Yaconelli's insights are both challenging and well worth your earnest consideration! Enjoy.

"Our search for love, for meaning, for happiness, is often our search for God in disguise. When the bottom falls out of our lives, when we come to a dead end, when there is no place to go, we often get in touch with our longings for God... What this [Samaritan] woman expects from the Messiah is a lengthy critique, an enlightening lecture on what she should do, a harsh and justifiable reminder of the consequences of her destructive choices on others. What she receives instead is compassion, gentleness, kindness and a way out of the ruins of her life."

[Yaconelli then shares the story of a prostitute named Marilyn, who, like the Samaritan woman, expects condemnation, but instead receives compassion and understanding.]

"Based on their experiences with religion, both Marilyn and the woman at the well were prepared for cold, recriminating judgment and condemnation. Neither one of them was happy with their life choices; neither needed to be reminded what they had done wrong; neither would have been helped by rubbing salt in their wounds.

What they desperately needed, what they desperately wanted, was for someone to recognize what they were looking for, not what they were doing. Notice, I did not say they wanted to be legitimized. They weren't looking for someone to condone what they had done; they were looking for someone to accept them. What normally happens to notorious sinners is rejection, distance, separation, and withdrawal. Most people don't like sinners, don't want to be around them, and whether they recognize it or not, make their disdain for the sinner very clear...

After her conversation with Jesus, the woman at the well begins a whole new way of living, though none of the facts of her life have changed. She is still living with a man who isn't her husband. She has still been divorced five times. Her reputation is still a disaster. Jesus often told people not to talk about their encounters with him, but not this woman. Her faith is only a few minutes old and already she has become an evangelist, already she is having a huge influence on her community.

What does she say? Not much. 'Uh... come see a man who told me everything I've ever done.' Everyone in town knows what this woman has done. Big deal. What she says is underwhelming. But the fact that she publicly talks about her shameful past is overwhelming. Her words are few and seemingly insignificant, but her saying them at all is very significant. In effect she says, 'I know you know who I am, but I just met someone who liberated me from my past, from my reputation, and I am no longer the person you think I am. I am no longer a hostage to my bad choices. I am free. I am free.' Still, nothing has changed. But everything has changed. Her neighbors can hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes. Her words are all they need to race to the man she describes. For reasons they don't understand, who this woman is now seems more relavant than who she was then.

The implications for us are overwhelming. Those of us who want to move on from our past, those who have come to the end of the road, can start with our unchanged life, now. We don't have to wait until we are 'mature.' We don't have to move to a new town or convince others we are serious; we simply start. We begin. We take the first bumbling, stumbling steps toward the spiritual life, even if we're not very good at it... Jesus can redeem our past, no matter what kind of past we bring with us; failure, mistakes, bad decisions, immaturity, and even a past which was done to us."

Preaching through Luke for over two years now has made one thing very clear: The way Jesus dealt with notorious sinners and the way His people often deal with them, are often world's apart.

It's been a reminder that we need to take (or relearn) our lessons from the Master -- to love the unlovely, watch the transformation that takes place in such people (and us) as a result, and then pray that God would completely remove that religious spirit in us that tends to move us in the direction of rejection and protection, rather than love and grace and the risk of reaching out.

With prayers for God's blessings on your endeavors to do so,

Pastor Jeff

Speed Limit Ahead

Greetings All,
This weeks 'thought'' comes from Michael Yaconelli's book "Messy Spirituality." It's a book for people tired of the relentless parade of success stories. It's for people who know their imperfections all too well and wrestle with sins they never quite conquer. It's for people who know their desperate need for God's grace in Jesus and cling to it with all tenacity.

The premise of the book (in my opinion) is found on page 13 where he states: "Accepting the reality of our broken, flawed lives is the beginning of spirituality not because the spiritual life will remove our flaws but because we let go of seeking perfection and, instead, seek God, the one who is present in the tangledness of our lives. Spirituality is not about being fixed; it is about God's being present in the mess of our unfixedness."

Michael passed away a few years back after spending 42 years in ministry. This thought is in memory of him. For his willingness to be transparent and for his many helpful insights.

The Sin of Speed and the Need for Increasing Slowness

"When my children were young, track meets filled part of each week during the spring. One particularly hot spring day, I attended a junior high track meet, arriving in the middle of the boys' 1500 meter race. During the last lap of the race, the audience stood, cheering two boys running side by side for the final 50 meters. A short distance behind them ran a pack of about four or five boys jockeying for third place... As I looked down the track, I saw one boy lagging far behind. Poor kid. The portly seventh grader struggled for each breath, his face red and sweaty, the main artery in his neck bulging and throbbing to supply oxygen to his deprived muscles. Suddenly the woman to my left stepped over me and rushed down to the railing overlooking the track -- obviously the boy's mother. She screamed, 'Johnny, run faster!' I wish you could have seen the incredulous look on the boy's face. He had to be thinking, 'Mom! I'm running as fast as I can!'

Spiritual growth does not happen by running faster. What keeps many of us from growing is not sin but speed. Most of us are like Johnny. We are going as fast as we can, living life at a dizzying speed, and God is nowhere to be found. We're not rejecting God; we just don't have time for him. We've lost him in the blurred landscape as we rush to church. We don't struggle with the Bible, but with the clock. It's not that we're too decadent; we're too busy. We don't feel guilty because of sin, but because we have no time for our spouses, our children, or our God. It's not sinning too much that's killing our souls, it's our schedule that's annihilating us. Most of us don't come home at night staggering drunk. Instead, we come home staggering tired, worn out, exhausted, and drained because we live too fast.

Speed is not neutral. Fast living used to mean a life of debauchery; now it just means fast, but the consequences are even more serious. Speeding through life endangers our relationships and our souls. Voices surround us, always telling us to move faster. It may be our boss, our pastor, our parents, our wives, our husbands, our politicians or sadly, even ourselves. So we comply. We increase the speed. We live life in the fast lane because we have no slow lanes anymore. Every lane is fast, and the only comfort our culture can offer is more lanes and increased speed limits. The result? Too many of us are running as fast as we can, and an alarming number of us are running much faster than we can sustain.

Speed damages our souls because living fast consumes every ounce of our energy. Speed has a deafening roar that drowns out the whispering voices of our souls and leaves Jesus as a diminishing speck in the rear view mirror. Spiritual growth is not running faster, as in more meetings, more Bible studies, and more prayer meetings. Spiritual growth happens when we slow our activity down. If we want to meet Jesus, we can't do it on the run. If we want to stay on the road of faith, we have to hit the brakes, pull over to the rest area, and stop. Christianity is not about inviting Jesus to speed through life with us; it's about noticing Jesus sitting at the rest stop...

The ugly truth, however, is that many of us do not know how to rest. Actually, we do know how to rest; we simply refuse to rest. [Adrenaline can be addicting!] * Rest is a decision we make. Rest is choosing to do nothing when we have too much to do, slowing down when we feel pressure to go faster, stopping instead of starting. Rest is listening to our weariness and responding to our tiredness, not to what is making us tired. Rest is what happens when we say one simple word: 'No!'

[Yet] Rest is the ultimate humiliation, because in order to rest, we must admit we are not necessary, that the world can get along without us, that God's work does not depend on us. Once we understand how unnecessary we are, only then might we find the right reasons to say yes. Only then might we find the right reasons to decide to be with Jesus, instead of working for him. Only then might we have the courage to take a nap with Jesus."

( * Parenthetical insertion my own. Learned by the experience of a fellow speeder.)
Living in the Grace of Jesus, Pastor Jeff

Dr. Jeffrey F. Evans